Helping government staff provide solutions for people with communication difficulties

Helping provide solutions for people with communication difficulties is one of our key focus areas. To increase awareness of communication disability and help people who may work with people with disability we’ve run a few workshops over the course of months about Communication Disability Capacity Building and Communication Difficulty Awareness.

In interactive sessions we discussed what practical strategies can be implemented to improve the way people with communication disability access public spaces, services, events and facilities.

Here’s a peak – a video montage – into a Communication Disability Capacity Building workshop that DDWA ran for local and state government department staff who are:

involved in developing or implementing a Disability Access and Inclusion Plan (DAIP), and
interested in learning how to better consider the needs of people with communication disability in a DAIP.

Watch video montage of Communication Disability Capacity Building workshop

In these workshops, participants became involved from the start and actively listened to and discussed what practical strategies can be implemented to improve the way people with communication disability access public spaces, services, events and facilities.

We explored questions such as:

What is a communication disability?
Who may have a communication disability?
Is communication disability linked to intellectual disability?
What about people who lose their ability to talk later in life?
What access and inclusion supports should be considered within a DAIP for people with a communication disability?
Who else may benefit when we improve communication access?

and/or sign up for our newsletter to receive invites to events as they come out:
become a DDWA member > ddwa.org.au/membership/

* this project has been funded by an Innovation Grant from the Department of Communities, Office of Disability.

In future we’ll be looking to deliver this training in alternative methods: potentially online with downloadable resources. We’re also building resources on our website under ‘focus area > Communication’: https://ddwa.org.au/focus-areas/communication with new resources being added regularly.