Fall 2024
Congratulations to our Fall 2024 award recipients!
- Liz Paradis, Production Arts Operations — College of Arts + Architecture in Robinson Hall
“Liz Pradis, Audience Services Manager, has been working diligently to improve access to events in Robinson Hall. Specifically this semester, she implemented a new service to make captions available on mobile devices for live events. This includes taking the script, reformatting it, and entering it line by line into the software, then training and working with event staff to ensure that it is cued live during the event to match the dialogue on stage. She has also acquired mobile device holders for use in the theater, making it easy to prop a phone at eye level to read captions while watching the show. This is making theater much more accessible to those with hearing impairments. She is also arranging ASL interpreting services for events, and is working on audio description and Spanish language translation for future events. She is actively seeking feedback from different users to continue to refine the system for access needs.
Compared to events with captioning at the Blumenthal, I found the system that Liz has set up at Charlotte to be much easier to use and more accurate. It has dramatically increased my enjoyment of live theater because I can fully understand the dialogue.
In addition to her service to patrons, Liz is also demonstrating to the students who work in Robinson Hall the importance of building accessibility options into live performance venues, making this the standard going forward.
I wholeheartedly support Liz Paradis for this award.”
“Liz Paradis is the Director of Audience Services in the College of Arts + Architecture. In that position, she oversees public engagement, ticketing, front of house staff, and the audience experience, etc., for the nearly 100 performances that the College presents each year. Over the past 2-3 years, Liz has been working diligently to expand accessibility to our performances. In particular, she has successfully implemented live closed captioning for all of our theatre productions this year, which has required extensive testing of products/services and training in order to use it. And not only is captioning available in English, but beginning with the next production, it will also be available in Spanish. In addition, Liz arranged to have an ASL interpreter at one performance of our last show, Clybourne Park, and also reached out to a wide range of organizations on and off campus to spread the word about this new initiative.”
- Katie Turner, Auxiliary Services
“Katie Turner works tirelessly to make sure that all forms, policies, websites and social media platforms are all accessible and promotes awareness about ADA in our own roles in Business Services. She has us read and get training to be properly equipped with accessibility knowledge in our marketing team!”