If you've worked in Easy Read for any length of time you'll almost certainly know the CHANGE Picture Bank.
CHANGE was founded in Leeds in 1994 as a campaigning organisation led by and for people with learning disabilities. Over the years they built a reputation for producing high quality accessible information. Their hand drawn illustration library became one of the most widely used image resources in the sector.
You'll find CHANGE illustrations in Macmillan Cancer Support booklets, local authority strategies, NHS publications and countless other documents produced over the past three decades. CHANGE was also part of the advisory group that developed the Accessible Information Standard. For many organisations the CHANGE Picture Bank was where Easy Read began.
It's where it began for us too. Before we founded Photosymbols, Pete and I were working in the NHS, and the CHANGE Picture Bank was one of the first Easy Read image resources we ever used. That was back in the mid-nineties when accessible information was still a relatively new idea and the tools to create it were few and far between.
A legacy at risk
When Advonet, who had taken on CHANGE as part of their group, made the decision that they could no longer sustain the service, there was a real risk that thirty years of work could simply disappear. The CHANGE Picture Bank, its illustrations, its reputation, its place in the history of Easy Read - all of it could have been lost.
Advonet approached Photosymbols to ask whether we could give the Picture Bank a new home. It wasn't a decision we took lightly. We thought carefully about whether we could do justice to what CHANGE had built and what it would mean to take on that responsibility.
We said yes.
A familiar face
There's another connection that makes this feel like it was meant to be. Shaun Webster MBE is already working with Photosymbols as an Expert Adviser, helping us develop best practices for working with AI in image generation.
Shaun spent over twenty years at CHANGE as an International Project Worker, campaigning for the equal rights of people with learning disabilities across the world, from speaking at party conferences to working with Lumos across Eastern Europe on the closure of long-stay institutions. He was awarded his MBE in 2015 in recognition of that work.
Shaun will also be helping to oversee our plans for the CHANGE Picture Bank. Having someone with his depth of experience at CHANGE, and his commitment to getting things right for people with learning disabilities, feels like exactly the right person to help shape what comes next.
What happens next
We're still working out the details but we want Photosymbols users to be able to access the CHANGE Picture Bank as part of what we offer. We'll have more to share on that in due course.
What we can say is that the illustrations aren't going anywhere. Thirty years of work, trusted by the NHS, by Macmillan, by local authorities across the country, is in safe hands.
Watch this space.
