JULY 2022
Obviously following up on this project/advocacy in general is still on hold. I do however want to highlight the excellent work going over in the UK by Access Escape. Specifically this post which is a great primer on starting to make your room more accessible.
JANUARY 2021
Unsurprisingly, there’s not a lot of news. Last year I was writing up a postmortem of The Owl Job with the intent of turning it into a resource for other escape room builders and designers on approaches to building escape rooms from scratch – or for modifying existing rooms. This is on hold for obvious reasons. Feel free to subscribe to the mailing list here if you’d like to be informed of when this project kicks back into gear again.
OCTOBER 2019
Escape room conference
In October I attended the escape room conference Superconductor in Melbourne. There I was able to meet with people from across the escape room industry and share my experiences running a sight-free escape room.
I made the case that sightless rooms represent a chance to merge the accessible with the creative. They’re also affordable to build, and I talked about ways in which existing rooms could be modified. I got some really positive responses and so I’m quietly hopeful we’ll see some movement in this area. I was happy to see that I wasn’t the only person there talking about accessibility in escape rooms either. In fact, it was around this time that I learned of another sightless escape room in the UK.
Another sightless escape room in London
Access Escape is a blind and partially sighted accessible room that’s been running since July 2020. After finding out about it I reached out to the creator, Hannah. I won’t share too much of the conversation since it largely involved spoilers for both of our rooms, but it was wonderfully finding someone else doing great work in the space. Access Escape is running until early February 2020 in London. For more information, visit their website here.