The Radnóti Theater is committed to accessibility. One of its social public affairs is accessibility but in addition to its communication campaign, the theater also obtained the Access4you certification at the beginning of 2023 and provides detailed accessibility information to the audience.
16% of the world’s population, roughly every fourth adult, has some kind of disability. However, we do not perceive this high rate in everyday life for two reasons: on the one hand, certain disabilities are inconspicuous, invisible. On the other hand, due to the lack of accessibility and reliable information about it, the affected groups are not or only partially present in everyday life.
Reliable information helps people with special access needs and their relatives to plan how to get to an unfamiliar location and to judge whether the barriers that arise there can be overcome. However, you don’t have to be atypical to need accessibility. In the course of our lives, everyone will probably experience some level of temporary or permanent disability or change in the quality of life. That could be pregnancy, traveling with a stroller, long recovery from an accident, or simply the physical and mental deterioration associated with aging. Therefore accessibility is actually a matter for all of us.
„In the long term, we can only really help if accessibility also happens in people’s minds, we have to change the way of our thinking. People with disabilities need outside help, and that outside help comes when we encode in our brains that they need it. We belong to the same world, we live in the same one. Even if we see people with disabilities less, because they don’t have as many chances to be seen better and to feel better in our shared world,” says Adél Kováts, the director of the Radnóti Theater, who represents the cause of accessibility within its sensitizing campaign starting from October.
The theater publishes detailed accessibility information on its website, compiled based on the perspectives of 8 stakeholder groups (wheelchair users; the Elderly and people with limited mobility; the Blind; The Visually impaired; the Deaf; the Hard of hearing; people with cognitive impairment, visitors with strollers, and people traveling with assistance dogs). This information is also available in Access4you’s database: their data sheet, which also includes photos and dimensions, can be reached on their website and in their mobile application.
The Access4you EU certification mark provides reliable information about the accessibility of the built environment to people with special access needs. They use a self-developed system based on 1,000 criteria determined by the perspectives of 8 stakeholder groups. The demand for the company’s activities is proven by the fact that last year it won the Best Impact Startup of the Year 2022 award by public vote. Accessibility and the lack of information about it is a global problem. Access4you certified locations are already located in 23 countries around the world and, in addition to Hungary, they already work with the help of an accredited partner network in the Czech Republic and Romania. The company’s own founder, Balázs Berecz, has been using a wheelchair for 15 years.
