Many of these events are leaving disability off their “diversity statements” and they’re also failing to account for disabled people who might want to participate. We have a lot at stake in the coming years and we’re eager to join our fellow citizens. We’re also tired of repeatedly asking events to foreground accessibility, rather than treating it as an afterthought, or expecting us to come in and clean up their inaccessible mess.

Real inclusive organizing should at a minimum include: Incorporating disability into your values or action statements; having disabled people on the organizing committee or board; making accessibility a priority from day one; and listening to feedback from disabled people.

How to Make Your Social Justice Events Accessible to the Disability Community: A Checklist – Rooted in Rights

Access isn’t a checkbox. It isn’t a policy buried in fine print. It’s the condition of possibility — the difference between participation and erasure, survival and burnout, presence and disappearance.

At Stimpunks, access means shaping space, systems, and design so people don’t have to contort themselves to fit into environments that were never built for them. We understand that disabled and neurodivergent people don’t need “special favors”; we need contexts that work for human variation — sensory, cognitive, emotional, and social. That means designing with people, not for them; listening first, assuming competence, and adjusting practices in real time.

This page explores access not as an abstract ideal, but as everyday infrastructure: tools, patterns, and practices that reduce harm, support regulation, and invite full participation. We share what we mean by access, why it matters, and how it shows up in design choices big and small — from lily pads and Cavendish Space to language, pacing, and interpersonal norms.

Access is not something you earn by working harder.
Access is what makes work, care, learning, and belonging possible.

✊ Enable Dignity

I and colleagues are working hard on some solutions for buildings that are too loud. Deafening noise prevents access to schooling, healthcare, and just about everything else, for too many autistic people. And it makes life unpleasant for everyone, autistic or not.

Ann Memmott

It’s always fascinating to watch a few people trying to mock those trying to find dignity in all of this.

Society needs to re-enable dignity, doesn’t it.

Because, without it, almost every single person will end their life in humiliation and mess.

So important to get it right.

Ann Memmott

Access is not just about entry.
It’s about dignity while you’re here.

Dignity means people don’t have to beg, perform, or explain their humanity in order to participate. It means support is offered without humiliation, and needs are met without punishment. A ramp that leads to a locked door isn’t dignity. Captions that exist but aren’t turned on aren’t dignity. “You can have access if you ask nicely enough” isn’t dignity.

To enable dignity is to build environments where people can show up as themselves — with their bodies, nervous systems, communication styles, and limits respected. It means designing so that no one has to trade authenticity for survival.

Enabling dignity looks like:

• Assuming competence instead of suspicion
• Multiple ways to participate instead of one correct mode
• Sensory safety instead of endurance tests
• Rest, pause, and return instead of constant output
• Clear expectations instead of hidden social rules
• Support that is standard instead of “special”
• Consent and choice instead of coercion

Dignity is not a vibe. It is infrastructure.

And it’s punk, because dignity refuses the idea that people must earn basic care by conforming. Enabling dignity means we stop asking disabled and neurodivergent people to contort themselves into harmful systems — and start reshaping systems to fit real human variation.

Access that doesn’t protect dignity is just another gate with nicer signage.
Access with dignity is belonging.

🤲 The Accommodations for Natural Human Variation Should Be Mutual

We are looking for ways to “enable dignity” for everyone in our community given our broad range of sensory, social, and support needs.

A few phrases we steer by are:

• “The accommodations for natural human variation should be mutual.” (@laurenancona)
• “Accessibility is a collective process!” (Riah Person)
• “Society needs to re-enable dignity.” (Ann Memmott)

With these in mind, we compiled an “Enable Dignity” series on creating accessible spaces.

• Enable Dignity: Accessible Systems, Spaces, & Events
  • Neuroception and Sensory Load: Our Complex Sensory Experiences
  • Making Spaces Safer: Bodymind Affirmation and Access Intimacy
• Education Access: We’ve Turned Classrooms Into a Hell for Neurodivergence
  • We Don’t Need Your Mindset Marketing: Education Technology and the New Behaviorism
  • Fix Injustice, Not Kids: Justice, not grit. Justice, not growth mindset. Justice, not behavior “management.” Justice, not rearrangement of injustice.
• Healthcare Access: They don’t take Disability Studies classes. They don’t socialize with us. They don’t listen to us.
  • We Need Human-Centered Healthcare
• Interaction Access: Opportunity but Not Pressure
• Written Communication Is the Great Social Equalizer
• Our Technology: Open Source Communication and Indie Ed-Tech

Accommodation is often treated like a private exception:
a special request, a personal burden, a favor granted by the powerful.

We reject that framing.

Neurodivergent and disabled people do not have “special needs.”
We have human needs, expressed through natural variation in bodies, minds, attention, sensory processing, energy, and communication.

The question is not whether people are “too much.”
The question is whether environments are too narrow.

Mutual accommodation means we stop designing for a single default person and then patching everyone else in afterward. Instead, we build shared conditions that make participation possible for many kinds of humans at once.

Mutual accommodation looks like:

• Multiple ways to communicate, not one sanctioned style
• Flexible pacing, not a single enforced tempo
• Rest as normal, not a personal failure
• Sensory safety built in, not negotiated case-by-case
• Clear structure and gentle transitions, not constant surprise
• Options to engage, disengage, and return, without penalty

Mutuality also means access is not one-directional. It’s not disabled people asking to be included while everyone else stays unchanged. It’s everyone participating in the work of shaping conditions — collaborative niche construction, shared care, shared responsibility.

When accommodations are mutual:

• no one has to beg
• no one has to mask
• no one is singled out as the problem
• everyone benefits from a more humane environment

This is access as solidarity, not exception.

Accommodation should not isolate.
It should connect.

Because difference is ordinary.
And meeting human variation together is how we build a world that holds us.

👏🧷🎁 Stimpunks Presents

Stimpunks Presents is where we share access-centered resources, talks, tools, and community offerings — work created by and for neurodivergent and disabled people. This isn’t polished performance from above. It’s lived knowledge, built in public, and shaped by real conditions.

We approach access the punk way: DIY, practical, iterative. We don’t just publish ideals — we build checklists, processes, and patterns that we actually use ourselves. In software terms, we dogfood our work: we test our own tools in our own spaces, run our own events through our own accessibility practices, and refine what doesn’t hold up.

Stimpunks Presents is a place for shared experiments in humane design — resources you can adapt, remix, and carry into your own communities as we keep building better conditions together.

Collected below are resources and checklists we use to help make venues and events more accessible.

But first, let’s learn about perceptual worlds.

🫀🧠🌍 Perceptual Worlds and Sensory Trauma

Access begins with perception. Neurodivergent and disabled people often move through sensory worlds that are louder, sharper, brighter, harsher, or more chaotic than what others notice. Sensory trauma isn’t “being picky” — it’s what happens when environments repeatedly overwhelm nervous systems. This section names those realities and offers ways to design spaces that stop treating endurance as normal.

Understanding the sensing and perceptual world of autistic people is central to understanding autism.

Everyone has eight sensing systems: the first five being the familiar sight, hearing, smell, touch and taste. These five give us information about the world outside our bodies. Three internal sensing systems give us information from inside our bodies – our vestibular system (coordinating movement with balance), proprioception (awareness of position and movement of the body) and interoception (knowing our internal state including feelings, temperature, pain, hunger and thirst). Although not all the external senses are equally affected by the physical environment, we consider them all – as they collectively add to the ‘sensory load’ that many autistic people often experience. Any sensory input needs to be processed and can reduce the capacity to manage and process other things.

As many autistic people process one thing at a time, sensory stimulation can stack up. As the brain’s highways become congested, there are repercussions throughout the entire neural network. This can lead to headaches, nausea and the fight and flight response, this is what causes many meltdowns and shutdowns.

Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic people in housing | Local Government Association

Imagine having no choice but to zoom in on life.

Perpetual defense mode – the silent wave

The inability to filter foreground and background information can account for both strengths and weaknesses of autistic perception.

Sensory Perceptual Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome: Different Sensory Experiences – Different Perceptual Worlds

Thus, all features of autism (social interaction impairments, language and communication problems, cognitive functioning, repetitive behaviours, etc.) can be seen as rooted in sensory overload experienced by autistic individuals. Autistic individuals perceive, feel and remember too much. Faced with a bombarding, confusing, baffling and often painful environment, autistic infants withdraw into their own world by shutting down their sensory systems.

Sensory Perceptual Issues in Autism and Asperger Syndrome: Different Sensory Experiences – Different Perceptual Worlds

🌈🤲 Quick Low Cost Things to Make a Difference for Autistic People

Access doesn’t always require a budget or a committee. Small changes — lighting, pacing, clear communication, quiet options, permission to stim or step away — can radically reduce harm. This section collects practical, low-cost interventions that make life more livable right now, especially for Autistic people navigating spaces not built for them.

Two Minutes to Spare? Just read this:

Quick Low Cost Things to Make a Difference for Autistic People.

Always ask us what may help. Our brains take in too much detail. We try very hard to avoid an overload of sensory or social situations. It’s not us being awkward; it’s a physical brain difference.

Welcoming and Including Autistic People in our Churches and Communities

1. Check the lights in each room. Avoid fluorescent or compact-fluorescent bulbs, if you can, as they appear to flicker like a strobe light, to autistic eyesight. Also, try to avoid bright spotlights.
2. Noise levels. If an event is going to have a lot of background noise and chatting, is there a quieter space to get to, if it is too much? Conversation can be impossible to hear in crowds. What about loud hand drier machines in the loos? Any alternatives like hand towels?
3. The building. Do we know what it looks like, and what the layout is like? Is there information on a simple website, perhaps? Photos?
4. The Order of service – really clear instructions for us e.g. where to sit, when to stand and sit, what to say at each point? Either write it down, or get someone to be with us to quietly say what to do, please. (This also helps those new to church).
5. We are very literal, and our minds may see pictures, not words. Please try to say what you mean.
6. Physical events e.g. shaking hands? Water being splashed onto people in a ceremony? We may find this physically painful, as many are hypersensitive. Please warn us what will happen, and avoid physical contact unless we offer first.
7. Rest area – somewhere quiet to go if we need to, please. Or don’t worry if we wander outside for a while, where safe to do so.
8. Socialising. Be aware we find it difficult and exhausting as we cannot ‘see’ or hear you that well, especially in a crowd. Our body language can be different to yours, and we may not make eye contact. Please don’t think we’re rude. Sitting next to us to chat, somewhere quieter, is easier than facing us. Telling us to ‘try harder’ to make friends is not helpful; research shows that it’s non-autistic people who tend to refuse our offer of friendship, because of misunderstandings and myths.
9. Be Clear and Accurate. If you say you’ll do something, please do it. Those on the autistic spectrum will be anxious if you promise to help but don’t do so, or promise to phone at a certain time and don’t. Or if you use expressions like, “I’ll be back in five minutes” when you mean, “I’ll be back some time in the next half an hour”. If you need to change arrangements, please just let us know. It’s about trying to maintain brain temperature and function, not about being controlling.
10. Support: Find a calm and sensible person who is ready to lend a little assistance if we need it.

Source: Welcoming and Including Autistic People in our Churches and Communities

🌈♿️🎪 How to Make Your Events Accessible to the Disability Community

A person in a wheelchair is at the bottom of a large set of stairs, looking up as we view them from behind.

Events are often designed around a single imagined attendee: energetic, neurotypical, non-disabled, and socially comfortable. We do not live in that world. This section is a guide to building events that welcome disabled people as full participants — with sensory safety, clear access information, multiple ways to engage, and dignity built into the structure.

🕸 Website Accessibility

• Use high contrast and consider using a tool to allow users to switch from dark-on-light to light-on-dark
• Don’t use flashing animations
• Use alt text
• Don’t use images to present text information
• Use skip navigation
• Offer a magnifying tool
• Caption and/or transcribe video and audio content
• Use descriptive link text (“find pictures of cute animals here” rather than “here”), as screenreader users may jump through links and need to know where they lead
• Include a website accessibility statement, like this one from Rooted in Rights’ parent organization, Disability Rights Washington
• Include event accessibility information prominently, with a clear access plan and contact information

Need help? Start with WebAIM and Section 508.

How to Make Your Social Justice Events Accessible to the Disability Community: A Checklist – Rooted in Rights

🚪 Creating an Access Plan

• Vet your facilities
  • In buildings, look for: Ramps; accessible all gender restrooms; doorways of sufficient width for wheelchairs to enter; ample seating; reconfigurable spaces; bright, even light.
  • On march and parade routes, look for: Even, smooth surfaces; sufficient seating for rest breaks; accessible nearby parking; accessible all gender toilets in easy reach; accessible ground transport; cover in the event of rain.
• Designate seating for disabled people in the front of the room or crowd and near the exits, marking space off so nondisabled attendees understand they should not sit there
• Provide sign language interpretation for all events
• Provide Communication Access Realtime Translation (CART), as not all people who have hearing loss or who are d/Deaf use sign language to communicate, and it can provide greater access for people with auditory processing disorders
• Consider providing loaner wheelchairs or scooters, possibly through a third party vendor who can assume liability
• Consider offering wheelchair-accessible shuttles
• Designate a service animal relief area
• Designate an access team who coordinate accessibility issues throughout planning and through to the end of the event, and provide them with readily recognizable markers like shirts, vests, or hats so they’re easy to find
• Develop a scent policy — going scent-free will enhance accessibility
• Consider designating a quiet space or room
• Use a public address (PA) system
• Ensure that anyone who is speaking, including audience members, use microphones
• Consider audio assistance, like hearing loops, for people who have hearing loss and rely on assistive technologies such as hearing aids

Need help? This ADA checklist can be a great resource, as can this guide on designing ADA-compliant events; the Autistic Self Advocacy Network is a good place to start with more inclusive access policies.

How to Make Your Social Justice Events Accessible to the Disability Community: A Checklist – Rooted in Rights

📕 Making Your Event Policies Disability-Friendly

• Include disabled people in your leadership, organization, scheduled speakers and panelists, imagery, and documentation
• Include disability in your anti-harassment, anti-discrimination, and diversity policies, recognizing disability as a social and political category
• Assume disabled people are in the room, even if they aren’t evident, and that they are stakeholders in your event
• Include a disability orientation for all volunteers and staff
• Include a space on your registration form for people to express access needs
• Document your accessibility policy and efforts and make them public
• Have a framework in place for responding to criticism and feedback from the disability community
• Be mindful of your language:
  •  Avoid words that use disability as an insult, like “crazy” or “hysterical”
  • Avoid phrases such as “wheelchair-bound” or “suffers from”
• Pay disability consultants like you would other professionals who are providing services

Need help? Here are some examples of accessibility policies to draw upon: SXSW; NOLOSE; National Conference of State Legislatures website accessibility policy; and Convergence.

How to Make Your Social Justice Events Accessible to the Disability Community: A Checklist – Rooted in Rights

🌏🏗 Universal Design

Universal Design is the practice of designing from the start for human variation instead of retrofitting access later. It’s not about making one perfect experience for everyone — it’s about creating flexible, multiple pathways so more people can belong without special pleading. This section explores Universal Design as access infrastructure, not charity.

Accessible event planning includes four steps. These four steps are universal design, physical accessibility, sensory accessibility, and cognitive accessibility.

Here is what each of these steps means:

Holding Inclusive Events: A Guide to Accessible Event Planning

• Universal design means everyone can go and take part at an event. Physical accessibility, sensory accessibility, and cognitive accessibility must happen for everyone to take part.
  • Physical Accessibility: The space has no problems for wheelchair users and people with vision disabilities
  • Sensory Accessibility: The event is safe for people with allergies. There are accommodations for people who are Blind, Deaf, or hard of hearing.
  • Cognitive Accessibility: Give clear information about the event. Provide all material in different formats and plain language. Let people know what to expect in advance.
• Accept and deal with accessibility needs that are different from yours.

Holding Inclusive Events: A Guide to Accessible Event Planning

🧱 Physical Accessibility

All physical space used for the event can be used by everybody. This includes hotels, elevators, and conference rooms.

Examples of physical accessibility include:

🎧 Sensory Accessibility

There are two types of sensory accessibility:

1. Hearing and visual aids are available (sometimes overlaps with cognitive accessibility)

2. A safe place for people with chemical and light allergies and/or sensitivities.

Examples of hearing, visual, and tactile (sense of touch) accommodations

• Image descriptions for presentations and captioning for videos
• Sound devices for hard-of-hearing attendees
• Microphones
• CART and ASL interpretation
• Alternative formats: braille, digital, easy read (plain language with pictures), large print

Examples of accommodations for chemical and light sensitivities

• Fragrance free policies
• No flash photography policies
• ASL applause (or “flapplause”) instead of clapping
• Noise cancelling ear muffs
• Sensory free rooms
• Working air conditioning

Holding Inclusive Events: A Guide to Accessible Event Planning

For more, visit “Neuroception and Sensory Load: Our Complex Sensory Experiences“

🧠 Cognitive Accessibility

Everyone who comes to the event knows what to expect. Everyone knows:

1. What the event is about.
2. The schedule.
3. Where the event is.
4. What accommodations are available.

Examples of cognitive accessibility include:

💨 Reducing Transmission of COVID-19 Through Improvements to Indoor Air Quality: A Checklist for Community Spaces

Air is access. Clean indoor air is disability justice. Many disabled and immunocompromised people are excluded when spaces treat airborne risk as inevitable. This checklist is practical guidance for making indoor environments safer through ventilation, filtration, and care-driven public health design.

MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions offers “a plain language, step-by-step guide outlining how community spaces can use indoor air quality measures to help reduce transmission of COVID-19.”

Improvements to indoor air quality can help limit transmission of COVID-19 and other respiratory diseases. We’re working with researchers with expertise in engineering, indoor air quality, epidemiology, public health and knowledge translation to help share practical information about improving indoor air quality with community spaces in Toronto and beyond.

Sharing practical information about indoor air quality with community spaces – MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions

Here’s a quick list illustrating what a building looks like when best indoor air quality practices are in place. We share details about each of these points in the following sections.

• HVAC system is regularly maintained by an HVAC professional.
• HVAC system uses filters that have a Minimum Efficiency Reporting Value or “MERV” of 13 or higher (check with HVAC professional before upgrading filters).
• HVAC filters are surrounded by a good seal, so that no air by-passes them. Each room has a minimum of six total air changes per hour.
• Where you are not confident that your HVAC system provides six total air changes per hour, or where there is no HVAC system, each room has appropriately-sized portable air filters.
• HVAC system brings in some outdoor air and, at a minimum, meets ventilation standards.
• HVAC system provides ventilation and filtration at all times while building is in use.
• In higher-risk spaces, such as communal eating or sleeping areas, additional measures are used to achieve more than six total air changes an hour. For example, additional measures may include:
  • If possible, HVAC system brings in 100 per cent outdoor air.
  • Where room conditions such as ceiling height allow, a professional has installed upper-room ultraviolet disinfection.
• Bathrooms are equipped with appropriate-sized fans that exhaust to the outside.
• Room air is changed over at least three times between appointments or groups.

Sharing practical information about indoor air quality with community spaces – MAP Centre for Urban Health Solutions

✅ Access Survey

This section provides practical surveys and checklists for assessing the accessibility of buildings, venues, and environments. These tools help identify common barriers across sensory, cognitive, mobility, and wayfinding needs — including lighting, sound, navigation, seating, signage, air quality, and rest spaces. Use them to evaluate conditions on the ground and make concrete improvements before people arrive.

We like this simple access survey for assessing venues from ATX Go.

Click to access ATX-Go-Access-Survey.pdf

We expand upon this with our own access survey and access Field Guide.

☑ Other Accessibility Checklists

Access is complex, and no single checklist covers every context. This section collects additional resources and practical guides for designing with care across sensory, cognitive, physical, and social dimensions. Use them as starting points, not finish lines — access is an ongoing practice.

• A guide to hosting a neuroinclusive event  | APS
• Accessible Conference Guide | SIGACCESS
• Inclusive and welcoming events – Make WordPress Communities
• Accessibility for WordCamps – ryelle codes
• Accessibility Checklist for SFWA Spaces – SFWA
• Increasing Diversity at Your Conference | ashe dryden
• Increasing Neurodiversity in Disability and Social Justice Advocacy Groups
• How to Make Your Presentations and Meetings Accessible to All | Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) | W3C
• Venue Accessibility Checklist – Make WordPress Community
• Creating Neuro-Inclusive Events – Do-IT Profiler
• Access Is Love Reading List
• Guide to Inclusive Meetings for People who are Blind or have low vision
• Accessible Syllabus: Accessible classroom resources promote student engagement and agency
• A Planning Guide for Making Temporary Events Accessible to People With Disabilities
• How to Make Your Virtual Meetings and Events Accessible to the Disability Community
• Disability Accessibility Event Checklist
• Outdoor accessibility guidance: supporting inclusive outdoor access in the UK
• Outdoor Accessibility Guidance in a nutshell, our two guiding principles

♿️ Standards and Guidelines

Standards can be useful, but compliance is not the same as care. This section links to established accessibility guidelines while holding a Stimpunks truth: real access is lived, contextual, and relational. We use standards as tools — and we go beyond them when community reality demands more.

The Access Board is an independent federal agency that promotes equality for people with disabilities through leadership in accessible design and the development of accessibility guidelines and standards.  Created in 1973 to ensure access to federally funded facilities, the Board is now a leading source of information on accessible design.  The Board develops and maintains design criteria for the built environment, transit vehicles, information and communication technology, and medical diagnostic equipment under the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and other laws. It also provides technical assistance and training on these requirements and on accessible design, and continues to enforce accessibility standards that apply to federally funded facilities under the Architectural Barriers Act of 1968 (ABA).

The Board is structured to function as a coordinating body among federal agencies and directly represent the public, particularly people with disabilities.  Twelve of its members are representatives from most of the federal departments.  Thirteen others, who are appointed by the President, are members of the public, and most of them must have a disability.

About the U.S. Access Board

The U.S. Access Board website is a useful resource for practical inclusive design that meets standards and law.

• ADA Accessibility Standards (enhanced single file version)
• About the ADA Guides
• Revised 508 Standards and 255 Guidelines
• Architectural Barriers Act ABA Standards (enhanced single file version)

🫀🧠 Ways to Welcome All Bodyminds to Your Spaces and Events

Welcoming is not a vibe. It’s conditions. It’s the difference between “you can come” and “you can actually be here safely.” This section offers concrete ways to build spaces that support many bodyminds: sensory needs, mobility needs, communication differences, immune vulnerability, and fluctuating capacity.

Here are “Five Ways to Welcome All Bodyminds to Your Learning Event” and enable dignity.

• Create real access pages. The logistics of disability and difference are overwhelming. Reduce that overwhelm with information. Provide an access page on the website for your venue/event that provides what disabled people need to know. This is one of the best things you can do to further accessibility. Just tell us what we’re up against, and be honest. So many access pages are nothing but “call this number for accessibility details”. When you call the number, you get someone who doesn’t know anything about accessibility. Over and over. We shouldn’t have to call, especially given that phones are inaccessible to many of us. Visit our access page for Stimpunks home base to see what we like in an access page.
• Create Cavendish Space. Cavendish Space is psychologically safeand sensory safe space suited to zone work, intermittent collaboration, and collaborative niche construction. Cavendish space provides caves, campfires, and watering holes so that dandelions, tulips, and orchids alike can learn, together and apart. Online and offline, provide individual spaces as well as community spaces so that learners can progressively socialize according to their interaction capacity. Our Cavendish Space page tells of Henry Cavendish, discoverer of Hydrogen, his autistic ways of being, and how he constructed social and sensory niches that allowed him to become one of the first true scientists, in the modern sense.
• Provide interaction badges. Interaction badges enable opportunity without pressure. Interaction badges facilitate intermittent collaboration, psychological safety, and sensory safety. Many of us Stimpunks, with our exposure anxiety and situational mutism, cannot and will not attend events that do no use interaction badges.
• Offer bodymind affirmations and provide outlets for stimming, pacing, fidgeting, and retreating. At Stimpunks, we use this bodymind affirmation before all meetings/gatherings: “We should all move in our space in whatever way is most comfortable for our bodyminds. Please use this space as you need or prefer. Sit in chairs or on the floor, pace, lie on the floor, rock, flap, spin, move around, come in and out of the room. This is an invitation for you to consider what your bodymind needs to be as comfortable as possible in this moment. This is an invitation to remind yourself to remember and to affirm that your bodymind has needs and that those needs deserve to be met, that your bodymind is valuable and worthy, that you deserve to be here, to belong.”
• “Ensure there is quiet space and outdoor space that people can access at any time. Many people find being outside and in nature very calming. Space to move away from other people, internal noises and distractions can be a good way to self-regulate.  Easy access to a quiet space to de-stress can be an enormously helpful tool for people to be able to self-manage. Ideally, this room will be away from areas where there is heavy footfall or other outside noise. Many people find neutral spaces beneficial, with the option of lights and other sensory stimulus.” —It’s Not Rocket Science: Considering and meeting the sensory needs of autistic children and young people

Five Ways to Welcome All Bodyminds to Your Learning Event

Visit the access page for our home to see what we like in an access page.

Irie Smial Preserve

Enable Dignity with Cavendish Space

Dignity is not a mood. It is not a favor. It is not something people earn by coping harder.
Dignity is what becomes possible when the environment stops demanding performance as the price of entry.

Cavendish Space is one way we build dignity into access. It names psychologically and sensory safe environments where people can focus, rest, regulate, and collaborate on their own terms. Cavendish Space rejects the idea that spaces are neutral and people should simply adapt. Instead, it treats access as something we design, maintain, and share.

Cavendish Space supports dignity through an ecosystem of human patterns:

• Caves for quiet, recovery, and nervous system safety
• Campfires for small-group learning, trust, and shared meaning
• Watering holes for open connection and mutual exchange

And it is held together by lily pads — landing points that reduce cognitive load, soften transitions, and make it safe to pause, return, and move at different paces.

When spaces include these conditions, people don’t have to beg, mask, or push through harm to belong. Participation becomes ordinary. Support becomes normal. Difference becomes expected.

Cavendish Space is access that enables dignity:
a built environment where neurodivergent and disabled people can show up as themselves — not as exceptions, but as humans.