Access to success
Actor turned access coordinator Julie Fernandez is leading the charge for the television industry to become more accessible for disabled creatives on and off screen. She talks about how the role has evolved, the most common problems on sets and what more the industry needs to improve.
As an actor, Julie Fernandez has had starring roles in long-running soap Eldorado and seminal UK comedy The Office.
More recently, however, she has worked on shows such as Hijack, Sex Education, Slow Horses and Shardlake (pictured above) as an access coordinator – a role focused on helping to open up the television industry to deaf, disabled and neurodivergent (DDN) creatives.
For many years, the British television business has aimed to become more open to DDN cast and crew. Yet it was award-winning screenwriter Jack Thorne’s MacTaggart Lecture at the Edinburgh Television Festival in 2021 that put the issue front and centre.
“TV has failed disabled people. Utterly and totally,” the His Dark Materials and Help writer told delegates.
During his intimate, personal, funny and heartfelt speech, Thorne also announced the creation of Underlying Heath Conditions, a pressure group that aims to make TV working environments more easily accessible to all.
The group then partnered with other industry bodies, among them Triple C, to author a report called Everybody Forgot About the Toilets, a study into the inaccessibility of the TV business, with a title that nods to a familiar problem facing disabled creatives on set. Within that report came the recommendation that all productions – in film, TV and theatre – should employ an access coordinator who can assist production staff to ensure those with DDN requirements have their access needs met.
Fernandez became an access coordinator two years ago after she was asked to partner with TV executive Sara Johnson to set up a new training scheme for industry skills body ScreenSkills.
“Disabled people have been advocating for themselves for years anyway, for free,” Fernandez tells DQ. “But this is the first time that this has been looked at as one of the care roles. If you look at the Venn diagram of care within a TV production, you’ve got wellbeing coordinators, you’ve got intimacy coordinators, and now you’ve got access coordinators, which is great news because productions are realising the more support you give the people you employ, the better it will be for everyone, including the programme you’re making.”
Since she started in the role, Fernandez has travelled to Australia to lead a training course for the Australian and New Zealand disabled creative community. In the past year, she and Johnson have also joined talent agency Casarotto Ramsay & Associates to set up an access team, which represents more than a dozen access coordinators, all of whom are disabled themselves.
“That’s incredibly important,” says Fernandez, who is a wheelchair user. “The number of times in my acting career of 33-odd years I’ve had non-disabled people telling me how I should think and feel and act as a disabled person, and telling me what I should and shouldn’t do and what isn’t and isn’t available, really irked. So we decided that all access coordinators we represent are going to be disabled and have an existing career in TV anyway. They are directors, writers and make-up artists – a whole range, and we have basically trained them in a way that we like to do the access coordinator role.”
Importantly, the team has also sought to make access coordinators affordable to productions. “It is not a full-time role,” she notes. “We suggest you take an access coordinator in pre-production for three to five days, which is 30, 40 or 50 hours across your whole pre-production process. Then we look at the filming, and then we look at post-production, and we dip into and out of the production’s day as is required, and we are there to support anyone who’s DDN.
“For example, there might be a director who’s dyslexic. We would look at how we can support them with documents in a format that’s more accessible. What apps are out there too, for example, to read that document out loud to them? It could be you have an actor in a wheelchair. How do we make the set accessible? You might have a production accountant in a back office somewhere who may be on the autism spectrum. No problem. What should we do? We look at the production as a whole and we support all the different departments and the individuals to help it all run smoothly.”
At the time of the report’s publication, representation of disabled people on and off screen amounted to 3.6% of executive producers, 5.4% of off-screen crew members and 8.2% of on-screen actors, compared to 22% of the British population that has a disability.
“The purple pound, which is the collective spending power of disabled people and their families, in the UK alone is worth £279bn [US$360bn],” Fernandez continues. “So the fact that television production companies have until now ignored great disability storylines, for example, or employing disabled people both in front of and behind the camera has been a little bit shocking.
“The more great disabled storylines there are, the more the likelihood is that we will join Netflix and we will join Apple and we will do all of that. It could be the difference between you getting a second season commissioned or not.”
In the three years since Thorne’s speech, Fernandez says the industry has been on a “really interesting journey” after his words “put a rocket up the industry to really think about how they are towards disabled people.”
“It’s by no means perfect, but it is most definitely improving,” she says. “More and more production companies and the streamers, and all the people that can make a difference, are having intelligent, nuanced conversation about it now.”
As an access coordinator hired during pre-production of a new scripted series, Fernandez and her colleagues might be asked to advise on scenes featuring a disabled person, checking in particular that the language and the tone are appropriate. She will advise on any access issues around locations, or help in hiring disabled creatives for particular roles, whether as writers, sound technicians or even suggesting possible cast members. She also works with production assistants when it comes to booking accommodation for cast and crew on set, as she knows first-hand how often venues aren’t accessible despite claiming to be.
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“We are there to support in a whole range [of circumstances] so there are lots of things we do in pre-production. And when we get to filming, if there are any disabled cast members or SAs [supporting artists], it’s really helpful to have your access coordinator there for the first couple of days of the shoot, just to help everything run smoothly.
“You’re looking at your locations. Is it accessible? There are lots of cables on the floor when you’re on the show. Have you got little ramps over them so people can safely hop over all of those cables? Do you have a red alarm in the toilets? If you are deaf and the fire alarm goes off, you can’t hear it, but you can see the red light flashing. You’re there to support.”
Similarly, in post-production, Fernandez will often support a whole new team in the editing suites, before advising on publicity around a new series launch, particularly if one of the characters in the series is disabled.
“Are you using the right language when you doing your press? For example, let’s not put ‘wheelchair bound,’ let’s put ‘wheelchair user.’ Are the buildings you’re going to be showing the viewings in accessible? We look at the entire process.”
Of all the people she has supported on productions, Fernandez estimates 70% are neurodivergent – covering a range of conditions from autism and ADHD to dyslexia and dyspraxia – and 30% have a physical disability. “So there’s a big difference,” she notes. “People still struggle with the whole disabled thing, and part of that is to do with the attitudes of people. It is getting better but, for so long, society has been saying disabled people are not capable; not intelligent enough, not sexy enough, they can’t get out the house. So you’re having to fight that kind of attitude and help non-disabled people to feel comfortable. I might have speech difficulties, for example, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a first degree in politics. So it’s a learning curve, but we are definitely get there.”
Owing to the fragmented nature of the role, where she’s “dipping in and out” of shows, the most jobs Fernandez has taken on at any one time is 15, but she says the number of productions now hiring access coordinators is still “a trickle, not a flow yet.”
And though the types of series she’s working on can differ wildly in tone or genre, the problems she is confronting are often universal issues that can be present on any set.
“If you’re a wheelchair user or you’re deaf and you use a BSL [British Sign Language] interpreter, it’s exactly the same wherever you are on whatever project you’re doing,” she says. “As a wheelchair user, you need to be able to get into and out of the building. So you need ramps. Have we got an accessible dressing room? Have we hired an accessible toilet when we’re out on location? That’s the same whether it’s Shardlake, Doctor Who or whatever the genre.
“Our access coordinators at Casarotto go out to all the genres of television and access requirements are exactly the same. Where it gets a bit nuanced is with Shardlake – we’re dealing with ancient castles and we have to make them as accessible as we can. It’s really about thinking outside the box.”
If there’s one aspect of accessibility producers should be thinking about, Fernandez says it is to put a line in the budget for disability support and go to commissioners, financiers and other partners with the demand to hire an access coordinator.
“We at Casarotto have made the cost of employing an access coordinator totally affordable. We didn’t want to do it otherwise, because we need the process to happen, and it would have made it too expensive and frightened people off. We would be going round in circles,” she explains. “So put an access budget in the line in the budget. ITV, the BBC and lots of channels are really beginning to go, ‘OK,’ because they are beginning to understand how powerful it is to have disabled people on their productions.”
In particular, Fernandez praises BBC crime drama Silent Witness – a project she has been working on herself – for its approach to access coordination. “We’re seeing two types of productions that have an access coordinator on board: those that want to just use it as a tick-box experience and don’t really engage so awfully well, and then those that really engage with it, that see the value in the worth of having it and really bring them into the production,” she says.
“Silent Witness has most definitely been one of the best productions we’ve put an access coordinator on. They’ve been amazing, and it just shows because, quietly, the access coordinator is supporting everyone. By doing that, it allows that disabled individual just to turn up and be creatively brilliant and not worry about anything else.”
Fernandez’s hope now is that in 10 years’ time, access coordinators won’t be needed because executives will be better aware of what is needed to support disabled creatives, and those same creatives feel confident to express their own access needs.
“But that’s going to take time,” she adds. “At the moment, Sara and I are concentrating this year on TV, film and theatre. But next year, we’re going to be looking at extending the role into the gaming industry, the music industry, the advertising industry, because disabled people work and want to work everywhere. Eventually we want to be looking at all of the different sectors.”
tagged in: Julie Fernandez, Shardlake, Silent Witness