Two years ago, the Inklusion Guide was launched to an international audience at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. It had one sole aim: to make literature events accessible to disabled people. We want to make good access the norm, not the exception.

And what a positive response it has had. After the launch, we were bombarded with requests from publishers and literary organisations to provide a list of "best-practice" recommendations, from those who had been waiting fervently for the guide. What we saw is the industry actively looking for solutions, to change for the better.

Now the time has come to measure the impact of the guide, to try to understand if we achieved our aims, to see if event organisers have started thinking about access in a more integrated fashion. We need to know if making better provisions can be done viably, and whether it has increased the number of disabled speakers and audience members attending events. Demonstrating this helps us to ensure good access provisions are not a one-time thing, but the new norm. While the feedback has been encouraging, we need to know where the challenges lie when it comes to organisers implementing our advice. 

And challenges there certainly are. Despite the positive response, we know from experience that unacceptable access is sadly still very much out there. Just this year, Inklusion was invited to speak at an event about inclusion, yet the organiser was unable to meet our accommodation requirements. Even as organisers invite us to speak about the lack of inclusion and disability equity in our industry, they can, in the same breath, deny us the very provisions that meet our needs in getting there.

So as much as things are going well—getting better, even—there is still much work to be done before disabled people are as welcome in our offices, on our stages and on our shelves as non-disabled people. There are over 14 million disabled people in the UK and they are currently being enormously underserved by industry gatekeepers and publishers. We believe it is essential to support disabled people in creating their work, to dismantle barriers, in order to bring diverse, non-stigmatised, non-trope-filled narratives and experiences onto our shelves.

We get it, everyone wants solutions now. Something bite-sized, actionable, concrete, box-checking. By far the most common request was for a summary of the 100-page guide. But it is not that easy.

The full 100 pages paint a broader, contextualised and textured picture of the entrenched and systemic ableism in our society, culture and workplaces. The guide shares the experiences of real disabled people—authors, struggling to overcome embedded barriers in developing their work, getting published, networking, engaging with audiences and accessing the wider culture of literary events.

Anamik Saha, author of the study "Rethinking ‘Diversity’ in Publishing", said in his recent piece on the value of measuring impact, How Long Can It Take to Fix Publishing’s Diversity Problem?: "While we are happy to see greater awareness of issues of diversity and inequality inside publishing, as well as greater transparency and accountability inside corporate organisations, more often than not, this manifests as tokenistic gestures towards the problem in a way that enhances the reputational brand of the house while keeping the status quo in place." He hits the nail on the head when it comes to our concerns, when he asks, "What if a visible engagement with the report, in both internal and external communication, becomes the end itself rather than the means to the end?"

When I spoke to him about the subject, he suggested that "maybe the real impact is in conducting the research and from our direct encounters with people in the industry, rather than from the formal outputs".

An interesting thought. And exactly why I am spending time interviewing people about how their use of the guide has changed their accessibility strategy: To see if I can paint that broader picture of change we are all striving for (email hello@inklusionguide.org if you would like to chat with me). 

For now, the survey takes us one step closer to understanding the value of measuring the impact of research and resources. You can fill it out here, and you can read more about the survey on our blog. We’re aiming for 100 responses so please share it as far and wide as you can.

And until the industry undertakes the deeper, ongoing work of disentangling entrenched, systemic inequality, so we may continue to ask these questions of what more can be done to effect real change.