Our Work With AccessAble
- 17th Mar 2025
- Author: Elliott Langley - Marketing Administrator
If you have been to visit the National Space Centre, you follow us online or you have spoken to any of our team, then you’ll know how important it is to us that our Centre is a Space For Everyone. We really do want everyone to have the opportunity to learn about space with us, and for a day out to be as easy and as stress-free as possible. But we also know that everybody has different accessibility needs and that a lot of planning may need to go into a visit. So over the last few years, our team have been working hard behind the scenes to make our Centre as accessible to absolutely everyone as we possible can make it.
For this Our Space, we’ll be catching up with our Head of Education, Charlie, to hear about how our recent work with AccessAble has given us a path ahead to make the National Space Centre the most accessible it’s ever been!
Who Are AccessAble?
Charlie: We wanted to work with AccessAble because we knew that they’re the experts in the field; their input would really help us to understand some of the additional needs that people might have when visiting us. The Education team has been doing a lot of work with our own Accessibility group, so I thought it would be really useful for us to have a full audit from AccessAble, so that they can look at what’s been working well and what could do with a bit of tweaking. It just gives us an idea of the key areas to concentrate on.
Anna Nelson, CEO for AccessAble: At AccessAble, we believe that disabled people and their families should have the choice and freedom to access the places and spaces they want to visit and have a high quality, inclusive experience while they are there. It is the ‘why’ behind all that we do.
By listening to disabled people over the past 25 years we have developed processes that delivers accurate, detailed accessibility information. Our website is trusted by over 6 million disabled people every year. In 2024, we were thrilled to be appointed by VisitEngland and VisitScotland to support key attractions to follow the lead of venues like the National Space Centre. We have nurtured talent and expertise in inclusive design, which enables us to support organisations, like the Centre, with technical advice on accessibility improvement in line with best practice.
We are thrilled to be working with the National Space Centre and we hope the partnership will inspire others!
Auditing Our Centre
Charlie: The audit took 2 full days and was as thorough as we’d hoped it would be! Access Able came in and had full access (no pun intended!) to whole of the building, with the intention of surveying absolutely everything here. Both the inside and outside of the building were looked at, as well as things like what information is available online, how we communicate with our visitors, what provisions we offer, our events, our educational activities… literally everything!
The plan was for AccessAble to work their way around the Centre and inspect all the different areas of the site, in order to provide a report at the end of the process that we could then take into consideration. But also, one of the provisions that AccessAble offer is their own accessibility guide to visiting the National Space Centre, which is available on their website.
The group went around the Centre, taking photographs of everything, which went into their guide and was also used for our own reference.
The Outcome
Charlie: Once the audit was finished, AccessAble gave us their full report, which was just as thorough as the inspection was! We’re still working our way through it, and we honestly couldn’t be more grateful for how in depth it is. It goes as far as looking at things like the number of steps between areas around the Centre, so that visitors with limited mobility can assess whether it is suitable for them or whether a wheelchair is needed, for example. Things like how high the threshold of a door is, or the height of a hand dryer in the toilets, or which direction you would sit down from in our seating areas.
They were very impressed by our sensory maps and our sensory signposting in the galleries. This is something we put in place to help visitors know exactly what to expect around the Centre. Some of the areas in our galleries are darker than others, for example, and sometimes there will be loud noises when we run demonstrations. The signage and map is how we highlight this so visitors know which areas they may want to avoid.
Our Accessible Afternoons received lots of praise as well, which is lovely to hear as we’ve been seeing these events grow a lot since we first started doing them.
The Priority List
Charlie: As well as giving us lots of really helpful feedback on what we’re doing well, the audit has given us a priority list on what AccessAble have advised us that we should be looking at first. Some of suggestions are improvement we can make in the short-term, and others will be bigger projects. The building is nearly 25 years old and it was built in a different time when considerations about accessibility were not the same as they are today. So there are some things that might be structural that we can’t change right away. But we can be prepared so that if we do make a big change to the building, then the audit report will be there to refer to when that process begins
There are some small things we can do right now that will make a big difference to people. One suggested idea I’m particularly keen to do is installing a mirror in the Rocket Tower lifts so that people with mobility scooters will see what’s behind them. It will make reversing out of the lift a bit easier. Then there things like making sure the height of the coat hooks in the toilets are of different heights. They might sound like small things, but they could make a big difference.
What’s Next?
Charlie: We’re working through the AccessAble audit and working out our priority list of what’s most important, so that we can start ticking things off the list and get things done this year. Then once that is done, we can start working out what we can look at achieving over the next few years and if any of them require extra budgets or funding.
Coming up, the Education team are working on some specific SEND projects with local schools. We’re working with Newcastle University for a project called "sonification", which is really exciting; basically, we’re taking images of space, such as nebulas, and creating a sound that goes with the image. So what noise would be associated with a nebula? This would mean that people who are visually impaired can hear what an image of space looks like.
We’re also working on a project called Tactile Universe, where we’ll be having 3D-printed planets for people to touch and feel the surface of the different worlds. So there’s lots of things coming, both short and long-term!
Helpful Links
Detailed Access Guide – This can be downloaded from AccessAble’s website, and goes into great detail in order to help plan every visit to the National Space Centre.
Sensory Maps – Our own guides to help you plan your visit and find out more about the provisions we currently offer.
Sensory Bags - These are available to loan from the main ticketing desk upon arrival for SEN/SEND children and visitors who may need to take time out from the full experience of the National Space Centre and the exhibitions.
What’s On – Check our What’s On page for information about our next Accessible Afternoon.
