With the support from the Community Rail Development Fund we will be putting ourselves in the hot seat! Over the past couple of years CRL has been involved in developing a wide range of different resources that aim to enable all people to be confident rail passengers.
These resources include traditional print-based materials, walkthrough videos of stations, virtual reality station environments and 360 degree street view footage with additional access information of Blackburn and Manchester Victoria stations. The education team use these resources whilst delivering our Railway Confidence Programme and we can see that they help people to familiarise themselves with the station environment and be better prepared to travel by train.
However, with the help of an inclusive research and solutions consultancy ‘Open Inclusion’ we are now looking to assess how useful, informative and delightful these resources are to a broad range of passengers, with a particular emphasis on neurodiverse people. This will be achieved through working with a number of pan-disability focus groups with lived-experience followed by professional analysis and research. And with that knowledge we know responsibility will come. The responsibility to take our new learning forward and make more informed judgements about what resources we should develop in future.