Ladder of Access for Visually Impaired Audiences

After the success of our work at Edinburgh Fringe in 2025, Extant will be returning to the Fringe this summer with even more ambitious plans!  

We’ll be announcing more details very soon, but in the meanwhile, our Artist Development Manager Louisa Sanfey has been working alongside the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Society and Visually Impaired Creators Scotland (VICS) to provide training and resources to artists heading to Fringe in 2026. 

In January, Louisa and VICS’ Artistic Director Kirin Saeed led a Fringe Society webinar exploring options that artists can use to include access for visually impaired audiences in their work, and using Extant’s ‘ladder of access’ tool to help artists audit the level of access that would work best within their resources. You can watch a recording of the workshop here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u8qIqw3cduw&feature=youtu.be 

Louisa has also created a a new and updated guide to support artists bringing work to Edinburgh Festival Fringe and beyond, to help increase the proportion of performances that are accessible for visually impaired audiences. We hope that it will support artists to take vital first steps towards considering ways to connect with visually impaired audiences – and move closer to achieving the goal we set back in August 2024 of having 1000 shows with visually impaired access at Edinburgh Fringe!  

Louisa Sanfey, Artist Development Manager, March 2026.