Towards sustainable and accessible events: an exploratory research perspective

In recent years, there has been a noticeable drive towards promoting sustainability at events. Nevertheless, sustainable events often overlook the topic of accessibility. In an effort to fill this gap and gather data towards possible solutions, two co-creation workshops were conducted that focussed on the practical elements of organising and coordinating an accessible and sustainable event that caters to people with diverse access needs. Through the use of practical examples taken from the work carried out as part of different EU projects, workshop participants gained insights into the logistics of creating an accessible event that is user-centric, collaborative, and sustainable. The workshops’ main aim was to settle a discussion on how to prepare guidelines and recommendations to organise a sustainable and fully accessible event. All lessons learned during the workshops were then used to organise the Green Digital Accessibility conference, which took place on 2 December 2022 in a hybrid format in Barcelona. This paper begins by outlining existing guidelines on accessibility and sustainability, before moving on to present the methodology and findings from both workshops. Subsequently, we will delve into the guidelines that were developed during the workshop. The goal of this study is to integrate universal accessibility guidelines into the ISO 20121 standard with the ultimate aim of establishing a template that ensures academic and scientific events are accessible and sustainable from their inception. This work concludes by considering some possible research avenues that combine sustainability and accessibility in event planning.