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How we work | 20 January 2026
How we work: Accessibility
Accessibility is embedded in our vision, our activities, our programmes and our company structure. We are committed to the highest standards in this and strive to be a leader in our sector.
In our Company Strategy, we have committed to “developing a cultural ecosystem that is truly accessible to all: inclusive of all forms and expressions of culture, ensuring everyone has a place to participate in our city’s culture.”
Our Vision, our Mission and our Values also put access and accessibility to the forefront, alongside delivering sustained impact through accessible and engaging cultural experiences.
Accessibility is also one of our Strategic Objectives, confirming our commitment to make it easy and welcoming for everyone to access and engage with culture. We ensure that we deliver information, programming and spaces that meet people's needs and abilities equally. We want to bridge gaps and remove barriers to culture.
Autism Friendly AsIAm Accreditation
One achievement in 2025 in this area has been our companywide accreditation of “Autism Friendly” by AsIAm, Ireland’s Autism Charity.
Over a period of 18 months we worked with AsIAm on:
- accessibility audits of our buildings and programmes and services
- training and awareness development for our staff and team members
- creating a suite of communications, including Visual Story guides to Richmond Barracks and to 14 Henrietta Street to help people with various access requirements feel comfortable in our spaces.
Iseult Dunne, CEO of the Culture Company was delighted to welcome Dublin City Autism Friendly Officer Maeve Gilmore from AsIAm to meet with some of the Board of Directors of the Culture Company to present the certificate of our accreditation as an autism friendly company in late 2025.
Universal Design and Accessibility
The Culture Company's Universal Design and Accessibility Policy provides a framework of broad areas that we focus on to develop our working methods, focus and delivery. We work within this framework to continue to develop our buildings and the Culture Company as a whole to make them as accessible for as wide a range of people as possible.
You can read the full policy here, or listen to an audio version of it, or watch an Irish Sign Language interpretation of it. You can also request it in Braille or Large Print if you require it.
Our Policy has 10 areas of commitment, which are set out here with examples of the work we are doing in each of these areas:
We are committed to Universal Design and Accessibility as part of all Cultural Initiatives.
We aim to make everything easily accessible - how we use language, how we write scripts, how we plan events, the signage we use, the design of our websites and more. We work with organisations including Path, NALA, Vision Ireland Labs, the Irish Deaf Society, Vially.io, Dyslexia Ireland, and others to build our expertise and toolkits to help others. We use up-to-date expert advice to improve accessibility across our offerings.
14 Henrietta Street and Richmond Barracks are accredited by both AsIAm and JAM Card, ensuring a welcome for people with any access or other requirements. With AsIAm’s guidance we created a visual story for 14 Henrietta Street, to sit alongside visual guides on how to reach the building.
A social story has also been created for Richmond Barracks, also supported by AsIAm. These will allow people with neurodivergencies to pre-plan a visit to our buildings.
We offer Irish Sign Language tours in 14 Henrietta Street, and include ISL interpretation in our Teatime talks when possible. We have also filmed these talks for those who were unable to join us.
Access Audits
We commission Disability Access Audits to audit our building and our websites consistently. We actively seek peer advice to always improve our offer, and to ensure we are looking at everything from all sides in case we forgot something ourselves. We act on expert advice; for example, sensory kits are available in 14 Henrietta Street and Richmond Barracks on the advice of AsIAm.
To date, feedback on the accessibility of our buildings, programmes and events has been positive. In the Sunday Times disability rights activist Louise Bruton reported 14 Henrietta Street implements “inclusivity and accessibility so impressively that it should be used as an example by all other cultural institutions”.
Staff training and development
Staff training is essential in helping the Culture Company to continue to grow, including ensuring accessibility and staff engagement and staff retention.
Over the past 18 months our staff have attended training from both organisations and from others including Dyslexia Ireland, the Disability Federation of Ireland, Understand Together Dementia Awareness and The Wheel. We constantly upskill in areas related to access and inclusion, such as understanding and supporting neurodiversity and the use of Plain English, guided by NALA, the National Adult Literacy Agency. We continue to develop our staff skills, knowledge and experience of working with us.
We aim to attract a widely diverse workforce to allow the company to flourish. Some implementation steps are simple to apply, such as providing our hiring questions to candidates before the interviews so they can prepare, and inviting them to let us know about any reasonable accommodations that might help them to perform at their best during the interview.
While we recognise that other steps will require time and resources for us to apply them, we endeavour to be up-to-date with best practice.
Our Human Resources policies follow best practice and are designed to attract and retain a workforce as diverse as the communities we serve. We make any reasonable accommodations needed to attain this goal beginning with the recruitment process. We aim to retain these staff once they join the Culture Company by providing them with the support that they need to do their best work and develop their skills.
We are committed to making adjustments to working methods to help all staff perform at their best', and to ensure that managers have the training and resources to support this.
Listening to people
The Culture Company continues to focus on collecting feedback and involving people with disabilities to identify their universal design and accessibility needs in the creation, planning, delivery and evaluation of cultural initiatives in Dublin City.
All of our feedback forms have questions regarding accessibility and access to our services and buildings in order to gather information from as wide a range of people as possible. Annually we engage a mystery shopper to visit our sites and feed back to us on anything that seems complicated, or non-straightforward so we can work to improve our information access, content and physical accessibility to ensure that our customer service is at a high level.
When the opportunity arises, we co-create with groups to make projects and programmes together.
Our Communications
All information published by the Culture Company is universally designed and accessible to all people. We regularly review and redevelop our websites, printed materials and all other documentation, both public and internal, to ensure this remains the case. We updated our company style guide to include learnings from training from NALA’s Plain English workshops regarding language, format and design.
We ensure our online videos are subtitled and social media posts are optimised for those using screen readers, wherever possible. We aim to include alt-text or image descriptions with all images we use across our social platforms.
Services and buildings
The Culture Company aims to ensure that our services and public buildings are fully accessible. We are constantly striving to improve our facilities and services. Both 14 Henrietta Street and Richmond Barracks are Part M compliant with some limited physical access to the staff areas of the buildings.
With protected historical buildings, there are challenges in improving physical access to some areas but we are committed to finding ways to overcome or work around these issues, for example by providing ground floor work spaces at Richmond Barracks if needed.
Health and Safety
We ensure that the Health and Safety needs of all visitors, volunteers, contractors and staff including people with disabilities are catered for their visit and in emergency situations. Individualised safety statements are created for any member of staff that may require one. We have emergency call points throughout both buildings and 14 Henrietta Street is equipped with an evacuation chair and staff are trained in its use.
With our Tours, Meetings, Seminars and Events within the Community, whether they are walking tours, events in other spaces or in our spaces, or in partner buildings, we ensure that accessibility is on the planning agenda, with information about access readily available.
Our Events, Tours and Culture Connects programmes are examples of the way in which our buildings are used as accessible spaces for the wider community. The accessibility of our buildings and the Culture Company’s open and inclusive approach is often a key factor in people’s choice of our spaces as the venue for their attending events.
For example, our Culture Connects Programme designs its workshops so that all ages, interests, ability levels and needs are catered for. A number of local groups with specific needs have participated in the programme as a result and have even built their own events around our facilities, such as the community garden.
Your feedback matters
We consider ourselves to be working towards accessibility, rather than just doing the bare minimum by achieving certification or ticking a box on a form. Our work is every day, through small improvements, iterations of our communications, discussions with community groups and organisations who work with those with disabilities or listening to people with lived experience of disability.
We welcome and appreciate feedback on what we could improve and invite anyone with expertise, lived experience or just a good idea to contact us at info@dublincitycouncilculturecompany.ie to start a conversation over a cup of tea.