Inclusive meetings and events

We want to ensure that all of our events are inclusive and accessible to staff, students and visitors.

The guidance on this page is suitable for all University and departmental events - meetings, training sessions, conferences, information fairs, open days and visits.

It will help you make sure your event or meeting is inclusive and accessible to people with a range of different circumstances and needs.

If you are organising a meeting or event, you may also have to respond to individual requests made by participants. For further advice, please contact equality@york.ac.uk.

Inclusive and accessible events: Good practice guidance

From planning your event to post-event administration, our guide includes everything you'll need to think about.

It covers choosing a venue, publicity, timings, food and refreshments, handouts and materials, and what to do on the day.

There are also special sections for social events and remote events.

Inclusive and accessible events: good practice guidance

General recommendations

Meetings and events

Stay on topic in meetings
Ensure only one person speaks at a time
Choose an appropriate room or meeting tool that takes into account the needs of hearing-impaired or dyslexic staff who may need to lip-read, have captions or see visual cues. Good practice to assist individuals with hearing loss
Provide small breaks in training sessions and meetings to allow re-grouping, thinking and processing time
Guidance on auto-captioning for virtual meetings
Recording meetings as a reasonable adjustment for disabled staff (internal use only)

Meeting materials

Guidance for servicing meetings: Use our standardised templates and resources to improve the consistency and accessibility of meeting records and minutes
Provide an agenda and materials for meetings a few days in advance
Provide a glossary of acronyms or key terms
Group information using headings or categories. Reduce in-line hyperlinks in online materials and make sure links are meaningful - see the Staff Digest for a good example
Attend training on creating accessible documents
Regularly review key folders as a team to ensure filing is consistent and clear to everyone
When you create a sign-up form for an event or training, enable people to add the date into their calendar, or invite registrants via a Google calendar event. See how to create calendar event invites from a Google Form submission (login required).