Accessibility and a code of conduct are decisions you make while planning.

Accessibility gets decided at the point you book the venue and draft the session schedule. A step you skip when signing the venue contract or setting the AV brief is a step someone has to work around on the day, and by then the fix is expensive or simply not possible. The same logic applies to a code of conduct: drafted early and enforced consistently, it changes who feels able to attend, speak and stay in the room; drafted as boilerplate and filed away, it protects nobody.

Where the decision actually gets made

Venue selection is where most accessibility failures start, because a venue can look accessible on its website and still fail in practice. Step-free access to the main hall means nothing if the breakout rooms are up a flight of stairs with no lift. Ask the venue directly about step-free access to every room you plan to use, and check the route between rooms. The same applies to programme design: a session format that relies on rapid-fire slides with no pause, or a panel with no microphone discipline, excludes people before the content even starts. Accessibility belongs in the same conversation as the room layout and the timetable, covered in Venues, Catering and the Costs Nobody Budgets For and Designing a Conference Programme, not added to a checklist after both are finalised.

Provisions to plan for

Some provisions are cheap and easy to get wrong if nobody owns them. A working list to check against a venue and a programme:

• Step-free access to every room in use, including breakouts, toilets and the registration desk.
• A hearing loop in the main hall, confirmed working on the day.
• CART captioning (live speech-to-text, displayed on screen or on a personal device) for sessions where lip-reading or a loop is not enough on its own.
• Large print versions of the programme and any handouts, requested in advance through the booking form.
• A quiet room, separate from the main space, for anyone who needs to step away from noise or crowds.
• A clear route for attendees to communicate dietary needs ahead of the event, and catering staff briefed on what that means at the table.
• Signage that is legible at a distance and in a consistent format throughout the venue, including wayfinding to the quiet room and accessible toilets.

None of this works without a staff briefing. The person on registration needs to know where the quiet room is and how to answer a question about the hearing loop without guessing. A provision that exists on paper but is unknown to the staff on the door is not a provision.

What a code of conduct needs to do

A code of conduct is a written statement of what behaviour is and is not acceptable at the event, published where attendees will actually read it and backed by a process for acting on a report. It needs to name the behaviour it covers in specific terms: harassment, discrimination, disruption of sessions, and what happens to someone who breaches it. It needs a visible way to report a concern during the event, staffed by named people whose contact details are on the badge or the programme. And it needs an enforcement path that has been agreed before the event, because the hard decision, removing someone from the venue, is not one to improvise in the moment.

Standards and bodies to check

The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on event organisers to make reasonable adjustments for disabled attendees and speakers. What counts as reasonable depends on the size of the event and the practicability of the adjustment, and the Equality and Human Rights Commission publishes worked examples that apply this to real situations. For the built environment, BS 8300 and ISO 21542 set out accessibility standards for buildings and are worth raising directly with a venue's events team when you ask about step-free access and accessible toilets. For the event website, booking forms and any live captioning display, WCAG 2.1 AA is the standard to check against. None of this replaces professional advice on your specific venue and audience, but it gives you named standards to ask a venue or a supplier to confirm against.

What the document actually needs to say

A code of conduct is the set of rules for behaviour at the event, published where attendees can read it before they arrive and enforced by named people during it. It only works if it names what is and is not acceptable in terms specific enough to recognise on the day: harassment, including unwelcome physical contact and repeated one-to-one contact after a request to stop; sexual comments about a person's body or clothing; taking photographs of attendees without asking, particularly in disability-related or diversity-focused sessions; discriminatory language relating to a protected characteristic; and disruption of a session that stops other attendees hearing it. A document that says "be respectful" and stops there gives the response team nothing to point to when someone disputes a decision.

Where it needs to sit

The code of conduct needs to be published on the event website before anyone buys a ticket. It should appear again in the joining instructions sent to delegates, on signage near registration, and in the part of the process where speakers agree to the terms of appearing, which sits inside the wider work of finding and briefing speakers (see Finding, Choosing and Looking After Speakers). A code of conduct only referenced from an app on the day has not reached anyone who needed to decide, before travelling, whether this was an event they wanted to attend.

Who actually deals with a report

Enforcement needs a named contact. At minimum this is one person whose job on the day is to receive reports and decide what happens next, with a second person able to act if the first is unavailable or is the subject of the report. Their names, and a phone number to reach them urgently during the event, belong in the same document as the rules themselves. If a report concerns a speaker or a sponsor, the response team needs the standing to act against someone the event has a commercial relationship with. A code of conduct that only ever gets enforced against ordinary attendees is not a code of conduct, it is a set of house rules for people with no standing to object.

The decisions that are hard to make in the room

Most breaches are straightforward: someone is removed from the session or the venue, and that is the end of it. The harder cases are worth deciding in advance. What happens when the report concerns a keynote speaker partway through the event, and removing them leaves an empty slot. What happens when a report cannot be corroborated but the pattern matches an earlier one. What happens when the person reported is a sponsor whose stand is paid for and prominent. Deciding these questions after the event has started means deciding them under pressure, with the person who raised the report watching to see whether they are taken seriously. Naming, in advance, who has the authority to pull someone from the stage or the exhibition floor removes the need to invent that authority mid-conference.

Recording what happened

Every report needs a written record: what was reported, who handled it, and what was done, even where the outcome was a quiet conversation. This sits apart from any legal advice on harassment, discrimination or safeguarding, which needs a named professional adviser. What the record supports is consistency, so the third report of the day is handled the same way as the first, and so a pattern across events involving the same person is visible to whoever checks. Building a code of conduct alongside the rest of the event plan is covered as part of Organising a Conference.

The Equality Act 2010 places a duty on organisers of public events, which includes most conferences, to make reasonable adjustments for disabled attendees, speakers and staff. The Equality and Human Rights Commission publishes guidance on what "reasonable" means in practice, and it scales with the size and resources of the event: a 40-person meetup and a 2,000-person conference are not held to the same standard, but both are covered by the duty. Whether a specific adjustment is reasonable for your event is a question for that guidance and, where the situation is genuinely unclear, an accessibility consultant or disability advisor.

What the standards actually cover

Two technical standards come up repeatedly in accessibility audits for events. BS 8300 is the British Standard covering the design of accessible and inclusive built environments, and it is the standard a venue's access statement should be measured against when you're checking step-free routes, door widths and accessible toilets. WCAG 2.1 AA is the web content standard, and it applies to your event website, registration form and any slides or materials you publish online. Neither standard is conference-specific, so applying them to an event takes some translation, which is exactly where a specialist accessibility audit earns its cost.

Who can advise

• Equality and Human Rights Commission — statutory guidance on the Equality Act 2010 duty and worked examples of reasonable adjustments
• British Standards Institution (BSI) — publisher of BS 8300 and related accessibility standards for the built environment
• AbilityNet and similar accessibility consultancies — for a paid audit of your venue, website and materials against WCAG 2.1 AA and BS 8300
• The Purple Guide — event industry guidance covering welfare and access provisions alongside health and safety

None of these bodies will tell you whether your specific event is compliant. They set the standard and give you the questions to put to your venue, your web developer and, where the budget allows, a specialist auditor. Building those questions into your programme and venue decisions is covered in the sections above; the destinations here are for checking the detail once you know what you're checking for.