This article is based on Vlado Vince and Natalie Kertes’s talk at A11yNYC.
Vlado Vince, IT director at Perelman Performing Arts Center (PACNYC), has been doing IT in the performing arts space for 10 years. It’s a fascinating in-between space, between something hugely non-technical — such as all sorts of things that you put out on stage — and getting into every little bit of technology that goes into constructing a building, running it, selling tickets, and then helping visitors have a good and accessible experience.
The performing arts industry isn’t known for being at the forefront of technology. When Vlado had the opportunity to join the project of constructing the new performing arts center, it was an opportunity to do things from the beginning to apply best practices for the time of the project. They also locked in certain approaches and ways of collaborating and building things internally and with their partners to allow them to continuously improve.
It’s important to understand the physical location of this venue. PAC NYC is located in lower Manhattan, which is the location of the 9/11 Memorial. It’s surrounded by skyscrapers. There’s also the transportation hub. There’s a lot going on. This location in lower Manhattan, originally inhabited by the Lenape People, before the World Trade Center was constructed, was a bustling city neighborhood. The World Trade Center opened in the 1970s and transformed the whole area.
In 2003, architects created a master plan to redevelop the whole site. Even 21 years later, the whole area is still not complete. However, back in 2003, decision-makers decided to build a public performing arts venue in that area to bring the arts to lower Manhattan. It was the first time at this scale.
It took a long time for things to get things done. The organization was incorporated in 2012. Folks started fundraising, making plans, and holding architectural competitions. Construction broke ground in 2017. Then the doors opened for the first time in 2023. It took lots of work and planning to get this building open.
Keep in mind that construction takes a long time. Everything else waits for construction to finish. Many folks will say the laws do not provide for sufficient levels of accessibility in buildings, even buildings that open in 2023.
However, unlike lots of other parts of work, accessibility, and construction are legally regulated to a certain degree. This means incorporating highly expensive pieces of accessibility that require sponsors to help pay for making those spaces accessible. For example, the entrance that complies with the Americans with Disabilities Act was planned out and given a sponsor years before Vlado joined PAC NYC.
The first PAC NYC website was based on an off-the-shelf SquareSpace template. At this point, PAC NYC doesn’t even exist as a brand. The SquareSpace website had no image description. It would probably fail automated testing. This wasn’t a full website. It’s there to tell people about the cube under instruction.
Selling Tickets Accessibly
The challenge for the PAC NYC team is to build and launch the website in less than six months with less than half the team and make it accessible. The goal was for PAC NYC to sell tickets starting April 1.
Nobody considered how to make the ticket purchasing process accessible on the website. The team had to think about why people visit art institution websites. They want to know what the organization is doing, they want to visit, and they want to buy a ticket.
Despite the website’s aesthetic appeal and multifunctionality, it needs to do one thing well. It needs to sell tickets. It needs to provide a good seat map that people can understand, whether someone looks at it in a browser or hears it described. It needs to take visitors through a purchase path and tell them about the seat they’re buying. It also needs to tell them about the accessibility options they offer.
And of course, it needs to process credit cards and deliver the ticket to the attendee. That is the main requirement for a performing arts website. The website can do other things, such as help people make a donation, share the organization’s history and donors, and cover the other types of events they host.
At the end of the day, they need to sell tickets. How do they sell tickets? They do it through a ticketing system. In September 2022, Vlad had to write three requests for proposal (RFP) and then run processes, select vendors, and get everyone going to be able to hit that sell a ticket by April 1 requirement.
Then, if you want to make sure that the website vendor is doing the best thing that they can to ensure digital accessibility, you need a digital accessibility consultant. To get this project up and running requires hiring the consultants. Fortunately, they had already started the RFP process for the ticketing system. By late October, they went with an upstart company called Spektrix.
They couldn’t conduct a proper RFP for a website vendor before knowing who their ticketing vendor was. If you don’t know what your ticketing system is, approaching a web agency and telling them to build you a website without telling them what type of ticketing system you’re running is risky.
They drafted two RFPs and sent them out to potential website vendors and potential digital accessibility consultants. That was a challenging process as it required getting buy-in from an organization without an accessibility manager. They also hired Substrakt and Equal Entry.
Everybody in the organization has some type of investment in making the website successful. The development team wants those donations. The marketing team wants to sell those tickets.
They kicked off everything by January 1, 2023. the fourth and crucial ingredient to make this successful. They hired Leo as a website consultant on hire to build this whole thing and coordinate all the vendors. The organization finally had a structure to manage the vendors to make this process successful.
The road to getting the contracts ready and all the folks in the room by January 1 would be unique in every type of organization. In terms of sharing lessons and best practices, it comes down to establishing simple requirements and priorities and pushing them through with interested parties.
From October 2022 to November 2023, the vendors scoped and built the website. By June 2023, phase 1 of the website launched. PAC NYC opens in September 2023 and website phase 2 launches. Shortly after, Equal Entry delivers the audit results. The team remediated the issues through February 2024. By that point, Equal Entry delivers an updated Accessibility Conformance Report (ACR) based on the Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT).
Taking the Phased Approach
They established a phased approach because it wasn’t possible for everyone to get everything by the April 1 deadline. The reason for not meeting the deadline had nothing to do with the website. They had to balance the work against what happened in that physical space.
As the team worked towards the deadline, they had to break things down into a minimum viable product (MVP) and lock in a structure that allowed them to iterate closer to the official opening is what allowed the team to get to a point where they were ready to launch on April 1.
They postponed to June 2023 due to events that had to happen for them to go on sale and launch. They simplified their goal in their first initial launch of the website and the first initial launch of selling tickets.
The phased approach meant that before the first phase of the website launched in June, they were already working on the iteration that would deliver the product that they wanted and do a proper audit.
The phased approach allowed them to launch a website, sell tickets, and introduce the organization to the world. While the phased approach was the right decision, the biggest challenge was the fact that as they got closer to the opening, their requirements kept changing. That meant the work would not continue for six months as it turned into 10 months.
The pressure coming down to September 15, the official opening, was high. They wanted to provide the best experience to those folks who came through the doors. Phase 2 launched two weeks after they opened the doors to the public.
So, how do we effectively communicate with folks trying to buy tickets? What are these spaces that they’re going to attend a production in? They might visit PAC NYC in one month, and they see Theater A combined with Theater B. Then, they go another month and suddenly they’re in an in-the-round configuration that looks completely different. They need to have some way to understand that when purchasing their tickets.
The compromise was to launch with an augmented built-in product. The mobile rendering of the purchase path was an awkward experience as some words were split into multiple lines. They also had a seat map with a bunch of colored dots representing seats. The accessible seating is shown in two versions. One contains a little wheelchair icon, and the other indicates a companion seat with a small C. It doesn’t intuitively tell you what those things are.
By October of 2023, they moved forward with a full audit by the Equal Entry team. Fortunately, the blocking issues only had 10 items. Then, they had 76 major issues, 72 minor issues, and 4 advisory issues. The following table shows the breakdown of the audit results.
| Scenario | Blocking | Major | Minor | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| S1: Explore site | 2 | 14 | 4 | 20 |
| S7: Purchase tickets – explore seat map | 4 | 8 | 8 | 20 |
| S13: Research and apply for job | 0 | 9 | 8 | 17 |
| S3: Explore and learn about upcoming shows | 0 | 5 | 7 | 12 |
| S6: Purchase tickets for show | 0 | 9 | 3 | 12 |
Here’s an example of the purchase path issue. The screen reader didn’t announce the accessible seating icons. This is an issue if you’re trying to provide multiple types of accessibility to a person both in person at the venue and at the point of sale on the website. After fixing the issues, they ran a second audit and confirmed they corrected all the blocking problems. The only things left were minor issues.
Lessons Learned
Start with getting your requirements in order and obtaining buy-in. Find ways to structure interdepartmental collaboration in the early stage. If you have that early stage without a lot of folks in the room, it will make it difficult for the important people to be on the same page about deadlines and how to meet the deadline.
Be ready to pass it on once those right folks are on board. Once they built the teams, they educated them on why they made certain decisions. They explained how they can pass on some of these best practices that they’ve learned. They ask them if they’ve implemented it in their own work.
Every region has its own policies with its own boxes they need to tick. If you must meet requirements in lots of different regions, it means that you also get to see how many of those tick boxes are falling short of what is possible when it comes to accessibility and what is a usable experience for a user.
Substrakt has worked with some of the biggest arts organizations in the world. These organizations are big enough that they think about these things before bringing vendors and consultants. They have to think about accessibility at scale.
Accessible Digital Design for Arts and Culture
The PAC NYC project is an accessible-first project. The team said they would hire an accessibility consultant first thing. They’re not just ticking the boxes. They did it in a way that pushed everybody else to do better. Substrakt encourages clients to get third parties to audit them and embed them in the process because there are always ways to improve. They ensure their clients comply with the regulatory bodies and regional policies whatever they are.
They work with users to gain feedback on how to do something better. Substrakt wants its clients to do that. It keeps raising the bar. They were lucky to work with PAC NYC and Equal Entry for that reason. It allowed them to identify blockers and think about how to improve. They use the knowledge to help them on the next project.
Substrakt has landed on some core principles of digital accessibility. The first is accessible experiences deliver a better experience for all users. That’s something that they discovered and continue to discover every step of the way when they do user testing in anything that they build like Viaduct, an accessible online purchase path that works in tandem with Spektrix.
In building Viaduct, they did a lot of user testing and focus groups. They also worked with many organizations in the U.K. They met with groups with mobility disabilities, hearing disabilities, visual disabilities, and neurodivergent. In meeting with these groups, an important question came up: How do we create a product that responds to such an enormous and vast array of different user needs?
They started by reviewing what these groups told them. These groups said they know themselves. Just give them the information they need at the point in their journey when they need it, so they can make the decision that’s best for them.
Many purchase paths are built thinking about these things as a monolith. These are the needs that policies and regulations say need addressing. That’s what they’re doing and they’re not thinking about anything else.
Asking Users for Feedback
They miss out on the gray areas and any nuances. For instance, they heard from people who are hard of hearing want to know where the speaker will be on the seat map. When was the last time you saw a speaker on a seat map? It’s unusual. However, speakers can impact the use of a listening device or a hearing aid. It’s something that people want to know.
They want to be able to call the box office if they have a question. Many clients ask Substrakt to build something that will stop people from calling. Organizations must put someone in a venue that’s going to pick up the phone. Sometimes people just need reassurance. They need to talk their needs through with somebody who works at the venue.
It’s also about more than making sure that person is there to answer the phone. It’s also about making sure that the customer knows how to make that call. What’s the number? What are the hours to call? Give them the information that they need at the stage of their journey that they need the information. Everyone across the board, across these groups, said: “I want to plan every part of my visit in advance.”
By every part of their visit, they mean from the moment they arrive. Are they parking a car? Are they traveling by transit? Are they walking from somewhere? When they enter the building with their ticket, how will they get to their seat or navigate around an exhibition? And then when they leave, you don’t want to abandon them when the show is over.
Give them everything they need. Let them plan. People with visual considerations said: “I want to know how close the seat is to the end of the row.” This is a reasonable request. If you cannot build a seat map that’s navigable or compatible with a screen reader, then it’s not useful to somebody who can’t see that seat map. That will lead them to call. While an organization may not want that call, they need to allow them to call.
People with visual considerations wanted to know which seats were best to see captioning in. It’s useful to tell people which seats are the best for using captions.
People across the board said they wanted to know which doors were closest to the restrooms. Another simple and easy thing that many people need. And it’s not just for restrooms. It’s also for bars, elevators, escalators, and quiet rooms. Is there a quiet room for when things get overwhelming or someone needs a minute?
Organizations put a lot of work into making these things available in their venues. But, then they don’t tell the people who want them in a place where they can find this information, which is when they’re buying a ticket.
Accessibility: Keyboard and Screen Reader Support
This is an amazing thing that ticketing platforms and many e-commerce platforms don’t have. It’s a button that says “Access info” that you can activate and get the information and plan that visit. Everything can just go into one place at the first stage of a ticket-buying journey. I also have bright and front and center on this slide: That keyboard and screen reader support is crucial to every single stage here.
If you activate “Access info,” it doesn’t have to be fancy. It just has to give people all the information that they are going to need to decide at the next stage. It doesn’t exist out there and many arts venues don’t think about this. Hence, this is the kind of thinking Substrakt is trying to ingrain.
Seat maps are tricky. They were the most daunting for the developers because there were a lot of things going on in a seat map. If you want to make them accessible, you do have to make them accurately represent all the things previously mentioned. How far away is a seat from a bathroom? How many steps are you going to need to navigate to get to your seat? You also have to be able to activate them on a keyboard.
Moreover, a screen reader needs to provide every single detail of what is going on in the selected seat. Viadukt is one of the only things out there where you can pick your row with a key or a section with a key, and the names of all those sections will be read out. Every single seat is accessible with a keyboard and every identifying feature of the seat will be read out including seat ID, cost, is it good for an interpreted performance, does it has an obstructed view, is it near the speaker, and so on.
The team did seat map user testing primarily with people who had visual considerations. Then, they tested it with everyone and many people found it easier to use or they preferred to navigate by keyboard for no accessibility reason.
Audiences who feel less anxiety when they show up at the venue will like the venue more. They’re going to come back more. They’re going to experience a work of art and culture in a happier way. They’re going to embrace it more.
The goal of any performing arts website is to get somebody to buy a ticket. People want to buy the ticket. They’re hooked. They know they want to see the show before going to the website. Then, by the end of their journey, they’re cursing because the ticket-buying experience is not a good one. They’re going to have anxiety about not knowing where to park, how to get to their seat, and other baggage that interfere with the experience.
The key is to reduce the anxiety of their experience from the time they land on the website to entering the building. The best way to do that is to make sure you think about usability for everybody, and not for ticking the accessibility boxes based on regulations.
Video Highlights
- Setting the stage
- Sell tickets accessibly
- Phased approach
- Web agency’s perspective
- Q&A with Vlado and Natalie
Watch the Presentation
Bios
Vlado Vince is a technologist with a decade of experience working in technology roles in the arts. While his background is in networking and backend infrastructure, he has developed a strong interest in building and applying technology solutions with a focus on end-user experience and accessibility. Vlado has recently helped open two new NYC arts venues: The Shed and Perelman Performing Arts Center (PAC NYC). Connect with Vlado on LinkedIn.
Natalie Kertes is the Director of Client Engagement at Substrakt, a leading digital agency working exclusively in the arts and culture sector to build user-centered, accessible and beautiful websites and digital products. She has worked in Arts Administration for over a decade, leading literary and theatre programming and audience engagement for organizations like the Toronto Public Library and the Koffler Center of the Arts among others.
