Layered Narrative Accessibility

Accessibility as Storytelling: Innovations in Caribbean Theatre

This project explores how accessibility can be embedded into storytelling through layered supports that help people understand, engage with, and experience meaning in different ways. Developed through a theatre project in Trinidad and Tobago, this approach is termed Layered Narrative Accessibility (LNA).

Rather than treating accessibility as an add-on, LNA positions access as part of the narrative experience itself.

Project Overview

Accessibility as Storytelling: Innovations in Caribbean Theatre is a practice-based accessibility project examining how live performance can become more inclusive for audiences with diverse sensory, cognitive, linguistic, and experiential needs.

Developed within the context of Caribbean theatre, the project explores accessibility not only as physical access to a performance space, but as meaningful access to narrative, emotion, context, and participation.

The framework developed through this work, Layered Narrative Accessibility (LNA), considers how multiple forms of support can work together to deepen engagement for diverse audiences.

These layers include:

• Pre-Performance Access: Accessibility guides, content notes, and sensory information provided before the event.

• Linguistic Access: Supports such as captioning, language clarification, and annotations.

• Sensory Access: Consideration of sound, lighting, pacing, and sensory processing needs.

• Cognitive Access: Supports that assist with narrative tracking, comprehension, and processing.

• Experiential Access: Designing opportunities for emotional engagement, participation, and orientation.

• Cultural Access: Supporting understanding of context, references, dialect, symbolism, and lived experience.

Together, these layers aim to support more equitable participation and richer meaning-making across diverse audiences.

About the Presenter: Hannah Sammy (MA)

Hannah is an Inclusive Education and Accessibility Specialist, Lecturer, Educational Therapist, and Managing Director of Holistic Learning Center Limited. Her work focuses on designing meaningful access across learning, cultural, and community spaces through inclusive, neurodiversity-affirming, and participation-centered practice.

Her professional interests include accessibility, inclusive education, equitable participation, and the intersection of storytelling, learning, and engagement.