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Nia standing at a podium, her hands held in front of her in gesticulation. Iola stands to the side. Being them is a red PowerPoint slide that reads 'Celebrating Cymru Anabl'.

Written by Nia Edwards-Behi

7 January 2025

After a year of activity the ‘Cymru Anabl’ Screen and Sound project has come to an end.  

‘Cymru Anabl’ – which means ‘Disabled Wales’ - was a project by the National Library of Wales Screen and Sound Archive in partnership with Disability Arts Cymru, Hijinx Theatre Company and TAPE: Community Music and Film, with the support of the British Film Institute National Lottery Screen Heritage fund. 

With the social model of disability at its core, the title of the project was intended as a reflection on the status of Wales as a nation which, at the moment, is inaccessible to a very large number of people. The same is true of the archive.  

For a year staff from the Screen and Sound Archive have been considering their work and the collections under their care in light of the experiences of disabled and Deaf people. If you would like to read more about the background of the project, there have been several previous blogs:  

Introducing Cymru Anabl

Opening the Door on Archive Film  

Working with Volunteers  

The project itself was organised around three broad branches of activity, namely learning and research; engagement; and assessment and exhibition.

While learning and research was something that happened throughout the project, it was also the first important step. Staff undertook disability awareness and Deaf awareness training, and spent some time on desk research for work more broadly from the heritage sector about archives and accessibility, including scholarly work in the field.  

A series of virtual meetings were held so that the project staff could get to know and understand more about the work of the project partners, including their best practices, and alongside this staff delved into the archive collections, in order to understand which items had already been digitized and which portrayed disability or were created by disabled people.  

This establishing work was all in order to prepare staff for arguably the biggest and most important part of the project, engagement.  

The bulk of the project's activity was hosting public workshops to engage directly with disabled people and archive users on issues of accessibility and archival representation.  

Workshops were held in Cardiff, Carmarthen, Aberystwyth and Old Colwyn, as well as an online workshop aimed predominantly at Deaf participants. Staff learned a great deal from these workshops – not only in terms of how to host events inclusively, but also in the conversations and feedback from participants.  

The final branch of the project work looked to the future.  

Descriptive captions and audio description have been commissioned for around a dozen films from the archive, so that when they’re screened or accessed by researchers they’re accessible for a wider range of users and audience members.  

Three of these films were screened at a recent celebration event in Aberystwyth. As well as that screening, staff are working with Film Hub Wales on a promotional package for the films so that cinema exhibitors across Wales might more easily choose accessible archive films for their programming.  

Finally, a public report on the project, titled Archive, Access, Action, has been published, outlining key learnings from the project and priority areas for ongoing work at the archive.  The hope in publishing this document is that the archive and broader institution might be held accountable in this line of work. It also allows the project learnings to be shared with sector peers.  

There are many thanks to be made at the end of such a project, primarily of course to the BFI and National Lottery for their support, and to the National Library of Wales for vital support in-kind. Thanks also to our project partners DAC, Hijinx and TAPE, especially Alan, Dan and Steven; to Emily Rose Corby and Michael Marlatt for their expertise; and to Matchbox access materials and technical advice. Thanks to our workshop host venues across Wales, our BSL interpreters and to all the participants who enthusiastically took part. Thanks finally to our NLW colleagues for their help and support too.

Category: Article