‘Stories of Access’: Tangled Art + Disability and cultural accessibility in action

In this article we engage a transdisciplinary perspective to analyse cultural accessibility practices, which are access practices developed by disabled people for the cultural field. Cultural accessibility seeks to disrupt normative culture by creating flexible practices that centre disabled people and disability community. Drawing on research with Tangled Art + Disability, a disability art gallery in Toronto, Canada, we explore the iterative and collaborative processes through which the organization has developed cultural accessibility practices. We narrate the provenance of these practices through ‘Stories of Access’ that illustrate how the context of the gallery – including artists, staff, audiences, resources, technologies, materials, spaces, policies and access commitments – influenced their development. Throughout, we demonstrate how thinking about practices of cultural accessibility as themselves transdisciplinary allows us to track more nuanced origin stories as embedded in institutional history, crip wisdom and practices and organizational specificity and resist the ways that access is taken up as a non-relational practice.