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Is Anna here from MacIntyre? I am, yes. Oh great, Anna, now I think Aziz
might have covered a bit in terms of consultation, but perhaps you want to say a bit about MacIntyre's
work and possibly follow on from that if there's anything that you feel, how could they consult
more, you know, if you feel the current way of doing it is not at all similar. Hi, my
name's Anna O'Mahony, I'm from MacIntyre which is a national charity and we support people
with learning disabilities, so they're actually based in Milton Keynes but we're working nationally,
so I came along today to ask about, how do you, who do you currently consult with and
how is that consultation carried out really, and that was really from an accessibility
point of view really, particularly people with a learning disability, that could be
on many different levels, and how do those people get their views across, and if they
have an issue about how people are represented in the media, is there a channel that they
can, you know, is there a way they can channel their queries and questions that will be received
in a way, and responded to in a way that those people will understand? I think there's different
ways you can do that, obviously you can do that one-to-one, it depends if it's directed
towards a particular programme and I think if it's directed towards a particular programme,
I'd write to the programme, or you know, if it's a complaint, complain about it. We do
actually respond to all complaints within ten days, because it's part of our corporate
requirement. But if it's about who is having a dialogue with who, from a sort of pan BBC
model, what happens is the BBC does lots of consultation with audiences so it does that
in different ways. For instance, every couple of months I sit in front of a group of people
who are the regional audience council, and they are part of the BBC trust, and they are
members of the public who volunteered to basically examine our programmes, tell us what they
think of them, and they represent the audience and that group of people across England, Scotland,
Wales, Northern Ireland, have to be representative of the population in terms of diversity, disability,
ethnic diversity, you know, age, the whole lot. So that is one way where I here direct
feedback from audiences, but that's done across the United Kingdom. Second thing is, obviously
we do audience research, and we've got quite a big audience research department and they're
often looking at different issues, so occasionally the Trust will say, 'How are you dealing with
deaf people, and how do you make programmes accessible to deaf people on the BBC?' And
so we then, they'll do a piece of consultation that is a national piece of work wherein then
they'll say to us, 'These are the things you're not doing, these are the things you have to
improve', and a lot of that is around people who are hard of hearing rather than completely
deaf, big issues about how the BBC uses music and sound in broadcasting, and that is cascading
right through the system to people who make programmes through people like me to say,
actually, this is making that programme inaudible to a big chunk of the population. When it's
with people with learning disabilities, I don't know how good we are with that actually,
I mean I have to say, that that is probably one area where I have had least direction
about how do you make those programmes accessible to those people. There's certainly some self
advocate groups out there that I think would always been keen to get involved if they knew
of a way to do that, so I guess maybe if we go through websites and things like that,
we might. Well, I mean maybe its something I can find out for you, because I actually
don't have the answer to that, as I say, I do, as a manager of the department we are
responsible for all sorts of things, we've got lots of targets and lots of health and
safety, whatever, and I have to say that's not one of the things, you know, I've done
all sorts of training, you do online training about accessibility online and you know, the
whole lot, and BBC's quite good at that actually, but I don't remember doing much on accessibility,
or awareness actually, of people with learning disabilities. Because for me, for a lot of
our staff, it's actually, some of them obviously will have members of family, friends, and
so they'll have experience of that but most people may not and I think a lot of it is
about educating people, people coming into contact with people, and just helping them
to understand. The best way to understand is just to conduct a conversation with people
and for them to tell you actually, and when we got this Craig Lundberg to come and work
with our programme teams to do this week of programming, it's really amazing about his
effect on people in the office, they learn more than they will ever learn from anything,
about blind people, because they were making programmes with him, and he had to do pieces
to camera, walking pieces, we even did walking pieces to camera with him, and the way they
had to shoot that, and talk to him, and it just made them appreciate so much about what
his everyday life was like actually, and what he could do given the right opportunity and
conversation, and that involved in doing live studio interviews with us, and bringing his
dog into studios, and you did watch it and think, when was the last time we had someone
with a dog, a blind person with a dog, in the studio? It was like, I don't think I've
seen that in a year of watching the programme, and I wasn't the only person who thought that,
the programme makers, the people who worked on the programme, thought that themselves
and realised that actually, they're not doing it deliberately, but actually, you make choices
everyday about what's easy to do and how you get stuff on air, and you don't realise that
you're actually excluding people by, 'cause it's convenient, and not because you thought
you were deliberately doing it, and it really helped people to understand a bit more about
that, just by doing it actually.