Tangled Art + Disability’s “Getting here on the GO” is one of the most honest pieces of access documentation I’ve encountered, and the reason it works has almost nothing to do with the information it contains. It works because it admits, structurally and aesthetically, that getting to a cultural event as a disabled person is itself a cultural event — one with its own dramaturgy, its own production design, its own failures of communication. As a deaf designer who has spent the better part of a decade obsessing over how information reaches people who are systematically excluded from the default channels of transmission, I want to make a claim that might sound counterintuitive: the most radical thing about this access guide is not that it exists, but that it treats the journey as a design problem worth solving with the same rigor you’d bring to the art hanging on the gallery walls. That is my thesis, and I will hold it the entire way through: access documentation is not a supplement to the artistic experience — it is itself a form of visual and cultural communication, and when we treat it as an afterthought, we reveal exactly who we think art is for.
The aesthetic of the afterthought
Most access information looks like it was designed by someone who resents having to provide it. I say this as a designer, not as a provocateur. Open any major gallery’s accessibility page and you will find a wall of text in the institution’s default body font, no visual hierarchy, no wayfinding cues, no acknowledgment that the person reading it might process information differently than the person who wrote it. There might be a wheelchair icon. There might be a phone number you can call — an act of almost satirical hostility toward deaf visitors like me. The visual language of these pages communicates a single message with startling clarity: this information is for compliance, not for welcome. The typography is indifferent. The layout is an afterthought to the afterthought. And the implicit audience is not the disabled person trying to plan a visit, but the legal department trying to cover liability. What Tangled Art does with “Getting here on the GO” disrupts this pattern not through some flashy design intervention but through something far more difficult to achieve: genuine respect for the cognitive and sensory labor that disabled people perform before they ever arrive at a venue. The piece walks through transit options, landmarks, sensory details of the environment, what you will encounter and in what order. It is, in information design terms, a progressive disclosure of spatial experience — and that is a design decision, not a bureaucratic one.
Wayfinding as world-building
I think about Georgina Kleege’s work on blindness and visual culture often, because Kleege understands something that most sighted designers refuse to accept: the way you describe a space constructs that space for the person receiving the description. Description is not neutral. It is architectural. When an access guide tells you “the entrance is accessible,” it has communicated almost nothing. Accessible how? Through what door? At what angle? With what sensory markers? What does the ground feel like under a wheel or a cane? What is the light doing? For me, as someone who navigates primarily through vision, the question is always about signal clarity — is there visual noise that will compete with the information I need? Are there glass barriers I will walk into because I cannot hear the spatial cues that hearing people unconsciously rely on? “Getting here on the GO” moves toward answering these kinds of questions not because it was designed by a single genius but because Tangled Art + Disability operates within a disability arts framework where access is understood as creative practice. This is the legacy of organizations like Sins Invalid, whose performance work in the Bay Area has for nearly two decades insisted that access is not a ramp bolted onto the side of a building but a set of aesthetic and relational commitments that shape the entire event. Patty Berne and the Sins Invalid collective articulated this as a principle: that disability justice means the access needs of the most marginalized set the terms for everyone. Applied to information design, this means you do not start with the default user and then “accommodate” — you start with the person who has the most complex access needs and design outward. The result is not a lesser experience for everyone else. It is a richer one.
What I see when institutions refuse to see me
Let me be specific about what bad access communication costs me, because I think non-disabled people underestimate this and disabled people are rarely asked to quantify it in design terms. When I visit a new venue without adequate visual access information, I spend roughly forty-five minutes of cognitive labor before I arrive — searching the website, cross-referencing Google Maps street view, checking transit apps for visual route confirmation, emailing the venue (and waiting, often days, for a reply that says “yes we have accessibility” without specifying what kind). That is forty-five minutes of executive function I could have spent on my own creative work. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes in Care Work about the concept of “crip time” — the understanding that disabled people operate on different temporal scales, not because we are slow but because the world forces us to perform enormous amounts of invisible preparatory labor. Access documentation is a crip time intervention. When it is done well, it returns time to disabled people. When it is done badly or not at all, it extracts time from us — and that extraction is not accidental, it is structural. It is a design choice made by institutions that have decided, consciously or not, that our time is worth less than theirs. I notice this particularly as a deaf person because the assumption embedded in most institutional communication is that the “real” information will be delivered verbally — at the front desk, over the phone, through an announcement. The written, visual layer is treated as secondary, as a degraded copy of the spoken original. Every deaf designer I know has stories about this hierarchy, and every one of those stories is a story about information architecture that privileges one sensory modality and punishes everyone who does not share it.
The guide as genre
There is a lineage here worth naming. Disability-led access guides have been evolving as a form for years, and “Getting here on the GO” sits within a tradition that includes the access riders developed by disabled performers and speakers — documents that specify not just physical access needs but communicative and sensory ones. These riders, often shared and adapted within disability community networks, are themselves design artifacts: they establish visual templates, naming conventions, and levels of specificity that mainstream institutions have yet to match. Carmen Papalia’s work on non-visual access comes to mind — his “Blind Field Shuttle” walks, where he leads groups of sighted people through urban environments without vision, reframe the entire concept of wayfinding as a collaborative, relational act rather than a solitary, visual one. When you start from Papalia’s framework, a transit guide like Tangled Art’s stops being a simple set of directions and becomes a form of relational design: the organization saying to the visitor, I have walked this route with your body in mind, I have anticipated your friction points, I have tried to give you what you need to arrive with enough energy left to actually experience the art. This is not charity. This is craft. And the distinction matters enormously, because charity asks for gratitude while craft invites critique. I can look at “Getting here on the GO” and say: this works here, this could be stronger there, this section assumes a familiarity with Toronto transit that a first-time visitor would not have. I can engage with it as a designed object, not as a gift I should be thankful for.
The information hierarchy we deserve
What I want — what I have always wanted, professionally and personally — is for access information to be designed with the same intentionality as a exhibition catalog or a brand identity system. I want typographic hierarchy that tells me what to read first. I want visual markers that correspond to sensory experiences. I want maps that are not just geometrically accurate but experientially accurate — that show me not just where things are but what it feels like to move between them. I want the people designing these systems to understand that for many disabled people, the access guide is the first piece of art we encounter from an institution, and it tells us everything we need to know about whether that institution considers us part of its public. Tangled Art + Disability, operating as a disability-led organization, understands this almost intuitively, but intuition is not enough. What we need is a discipline — a rigorous, teachable, crit-able practice of access information design that treats these documents not as compliance artifacts but as communication design at its most consequential. The access guide is the first threshold. It is where the institution’s values become visible — or where their absence does.
This article was inspired by Getting here on the GO - from tangledarts.org.