Tips to create wheelchair friendly accessible sporting venues

Venue accessibility is essential for enabling attendance to events by people with disabilities. How do you ensure your venue is an accessible one? Here are a few tips to assist in making sporting venues wheelchair friendly, as a step towards creating inclusive and accessible venues.

• Gain a deeper understanding of the journey of a person using a wheelchair at a sporting venue: To make your venues wheelchair friendly, it is essential to understand the different phases a customer has to go through as they travel to, enter, attend and leave the event. Understanding and trying to address the potential hurdles related to each phase will help in designing more wheelchair friendly sporting venues.

• Provision of wheelchair seating in all spectator areas of the venue: Wheelchair accessible seating should be available in all spectator areas of the stadium including sky boxes, specialty areas and should be dispersed throughout the seating in order to offer a broad choice and range of experience for spectators using wheelchairs.

• Accessible seating should be an integral part of a venue’s seating plan: Each wheelchair seating location should consist of an open and level space that can comfortably accommodate a wheelchair user. The surfaces should be kept smooth and slip-resistant to make the venue wheelchair-friendly.

• Conveniently located on accessible routes: Wheelchair seating locations should be easily accessible to and from parking and transportation areas, public areas such as restrooms, refreshment concessions and exits.

• Wheelchair-friendly concessions, restrooms, lockers, parking spaces: All the facilities in the sporting venues should be designed in a manner such that wheelchair users can easily access and use them.

• Ensure proper line of sight for the wheelchair-friendly seats: Wheelchair seating locations should provide a line of sight over the standing spectators as an audience can be expected to stand up during the sporting events.

• Educating staff about accessibility and disability: Educating staff about accessibility is vital in making sporting venues friendly for wheelchair users.

At Felton we have a range of wheelchair friendly settings which offer inclusive seating. Our grandstand spectator seating options are readily customisable to assist in creating accessible venues for all.

If you would like further information about our wheelchair accessible seating, get in touch with the friendly team on 1 800 834 016.