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Accessibility

Accessibility Policy

PLEASE NOTE: The Bookfair is hosted at CEDA, a Montreal-area community centre. CEDA has a policy of no alcohol or other drugs and we ask all participants in the Bookfair to respect this. The Montreal Anarchist Bookfair collective actively strives to create an accessible event. We aim to avoid replicating the barriers in society which exclude and marginalise people. In line with our principles, we organise the Bookfair in a way which attempts to challenge exclusions deriving from the main forms of social oppression. We are also attentive to less acknowledged, but no less real, barriers to participation, such as allergies. Concretely, our current measures to create an accessible event include:

  • providing free childcare;
  • making the event safe for and welcoming to children and their parents;
  • providing translation between English and French;
  • free admittance;
  • requiring journalists to ask before they take pictures;
  • assuring wheelchair access to main floor events (the upper floors, where most workshops are held and art displayed, are not accessible to wheelchairs) and being willing to move workshops to wheelchair accessible rooms upon request;
  • making the event free of smoke (including around entrance ways) as well as nuts, and perfumes/scents, in order to enable an event that's kid-friendly and accessible to people who might have allergies, including allergies that are life-threatening;
  • providing a space free of animals (except for helper animals such as guide dogs);
  • a policy of zero tolerance for racist, sexist, homophobic and other oppressive behaviors;
  • providing gender-neutral washrooms; and
  • attempting to accommodate specific requests relating to access communicated in advance.

Where access depends on the behavior of other participants, we will take steps to communicate and enforce access guidelines, and ask that bookfair participants concerned about accessibility do the same.

All of our attempts to equalise access are made within the limits of current resources and therefore may not be perfect. However, we welcome suggestions for improvement and will do our best to implement these.