Hi all
Here at Shrewsbury Repair Cafe, we have been working closely with some smaller but significant parts of our community and we want to share this work with you.
As we know, it can be daunting and confusing trying to find a repairer for lots of our stuff around the house, with services disappearing on our high streets and faceless companies only willing to engage through the internet. After all this is one of the reasons why repair cafes are increasingly necessary and popular. However, for those with disabilities, trying to find a repairer can be at times almost impossible and often demoralizing. To counter this, we have been introducing measures to enable those with disabilities and impairments to use our cafe more. Some of our team are trained in dementia and we have had a portable hearing loop kindly donated to us to help those with hearing impairment engage with our team better.
We have also been working closely with the visually impaired and sight loss community here in Shropshire, to enable them to have more confidence in coming along to our repair cafe. Those with visual impairment may have older electrical devices as they are familiar and also may rely on technology as aids, plus all the normal stuff we have around the house, all which can break down or become unusable. We rely so much on our social media pages, websites, videos and posters/leaflets to advertise our presence, but these are not as accessible for those with sight loss.
To help with this, one of our volunteers Simon Martin has produced an audio description of one of our repair cafe sessions and this has been shared with the groups we work with. It has resulted in those with sight loss coming along to a repair cafe session, knowing what to expect and knowing they will be supported. We cannot be certain this has been done before, but Repair Cafe International have not heard of any other group that has.
RNIB has a radio station (freeview 730) and they will be featuring an interview with Simon and myself regarding the audio description and how we hope it will help those with sight loss access repair cafes throughout the country. We have managed to embed the audio description in our Facebook page (its in the video section), so please take time to listen to it but if you would like a copy of the file for your website or Facebook page, please email the request to me at admin@shrewsburyrepaircafe.org.uk and I will forward it to you.
The solutions we have come up with are not perfect but they are a step in the right direction.
Pete Martin