South Philly Review

With the holidays around the bend and the chilly weather making indoor entertainment all the more appealing, the theater season soon will be heating up in Philadelphia.

For those who may have trouble gaining access to cultural performances in the area due to a visual or auditory impairment, Michael Norris and Art-Reach have delivered an early present this year.

"It's the first time there has been one go-to stop. Before, if you were blind, you had to look yourself, check out each individual organization and find out if they were providing any accessible programming," the Ninth-and-Bainbridge-streets resident said. "Now, you can just go to the Phillyfunguide."

The Art-Reach executive director and his dedicated team have spent a year-and-a-half designing, compiling and readying a calendar of all accessible programming throughout Greater Philadelphia. The addendum to the established site can be retrieved at www.phillyfunguide.com/access.

"'Independence Starts Here,' it's a joint program between Art-Reach who co-leads the project with another organization, VSA Arts," Norris, 45, said. "[The initiative] is designed to do two things: First, help cultural organizations became more accessible ... The other is the audience-side of it. So if you have an accessible program, you need people to come and enjoy it.

"This is what Art-Reach is responsible for."

To cull an audience, the minds at the nonprofit decided to create the comprehensive guide that would keep an up-to-date listing of all accessible programming in hopes of becoming indispensable and avoiding overlapping schedules.

"We want cultural organizations to provide access and they will be much more excited to do that if they know there is an audience for it, so it's designed to approach both those issues," Norris said of the online guide launched in early October.

The impact has been immediate, with at least one local arts haven at 1020 South St. reaching out to take part.

"The Philadelphia Magic Garden on South Street -- and the beautiful thing about them is they don't need any technology -- they were thinking about how to be accessible," Norris said. "So they had a group come in and they were able to go on a guided [tactile] tour of the installation and they were able to touch the mosaic and get a sense of what it is about. Now they are doing that once a month."

In other venues, programming adjustments for the hearing- and visually impaired range from LED-screen closed-captioning for plays to a live-action depictor to speak a characters' visual movements.

"A cultural organization would have to rent an audio description system ... and that can cost thousands," Norris said. "What VSA now has as part of 'Independence Starts Here' is an audio-description system that can be shared across the community.

"The cost barrier to access is significantly reduced."

Since coming to Art-Reach in 2004, Norris has relished his time connecting across multiple organizations and affecting the entire community in a significant way. The most recent developments are one more step up the steep ladder.

"We know that those who reap the benefits of the arts the most have the least access to them," Norris said. "The injustice of that is what motivates us every day. We know there is a great world of arts and culture we are so blessed to have."

Norris spent his early years in Chester County, where he got the first glimpse into his future career path.

"When I was a kid, my mom was a teacher's aide at an intermediate unit for a public school system. That was really my first introduction to understanding the challenges, the obstacles and the frustration that people with disabilities face," Norris said of the classroom setting for children with learning disabilities where his mother Nancy worked.