ITP at British Museum 2021: Siddhant Shah
Siddhant Shah is the 2021 recipient of the International Training Programme (ITP) at the British Museum.
Siddhant is the Founder of Access For ALL, an organisation that aims at creating inclusive cultural experiences for all. He is the youngest recipient of the National Award – Mphasis Universal Design Award 2017 by National Committee on Rights for People with Disabilities (NCRPD).
This week he shares the ethos of his organisation and what he hopes to achieve at ITP.
Access For ALL, one step at a time!
Image Courtesy: Access For ALL
My journey as an Arts Accessibility Consultant was completely organic and paved its way through multiple trial and errors. Access for ALL aims at pushing the boundaries of physical (even digital), intellectual and social access through innovative, indigenous design and advocacy while fostering an inclusive experiential culture, glo-cally.
Access For ALL is a collaborative social enterprise in more than one way because the team comprises both experts and people with special needs. We run a small Braille press operated by the visually impaired. Even the tactile renditions produced in the workshop are made by people with special needs and supervised by my mother who is partially sighted and has been a special arts educator.
I have had the opportunity to work with some incredible organisations such as the Kochi Muziris Biennale, India Art Fair, Jaipur Literature Fair Victoria Memorial Hall, Serendipity Arts Festival and DAG Modern, to name a few.
I am sharing my journey with the students of the Vivekanand School in Delhi in the TED Talk below. I speak about what inspired me to start Access For ALL and how, slowly but surely, I am able to make experiences more inclusive for differently abled people.
Image Courtesy: Access For ALL
The Inlaks scholarship for The British Museum IPT 2021 is a great impetus for an independent consultant like me who is paving his way in a nascent field of inclusion and accessibility within the museum space. This will help me learn and benchmark global best-practises of making museums and cultural spaces more accessible and inclusive for persons with disabilities. I am looking forward to meeting my fellow ITP participants from other countries as this will help me network and develop a strategic relation which can be used as base to expand our work of accessibility in the museums. This is also a chance to share my expertise that I have developed over the years of providing for access with limited resources and funding, which can come useful to museums that are based in similar economies as ours.
Being selected for ITP 2021 is surely going to me memorable as pandemic has proved that it isn’t a limitation but only a challenge to our innovating ability and agility.
Cover Image Courtesy: DAG
