This week I attended a black tie dinner with an after dinner speaker. The room was beautifully decorated with balloons. However, when it came to the part of the evening where speeches were made and the after dinner speaker said their piece, it became incredible difficult to see and hear.
The main issues were balloons (and centre pieces) that block your view. I re-emphasis to event organisers the importance of the height of your centre-pieces.
Most event organisers now appreciate (hopefully) that you shouldn’t have a massive centre piece in the middle of the table that prevents people talking across the table (that benefits everyone) but not all appreciate that going higher is not necessarily the best way to do this. Going for a tall but wide centre piece may mean that people can see clearly across the table but if it is high and wide (e.g. a bunch of balloons or a large bouquet of flowers) it will still potentially impact the sight line across the room and this will affect people’s ability to see speeches and any speakers. While a slight shift in position may assist with this in practice it can still be frustrating, and you can still opt for a low and beautiful centrepiece as an alternative and get rid of this issue all together.
The next issue is Shadows.
Dark shadows that fall across the speakers faces which make it impossible to lip-read properly. This is often a lighting problem. If the room is dark, do you have a venue where you can light up your speaker? However, it can also be a decoration problem. At this particular event the shadows were being caused by the beautiful balloons that were decorating the room, which was such a shame. While the lip-reading issues might not affect everyone, the shadows are still distracting and disruptive for your audience (regardless of whether they lipread) and the shadows end up being visible in the pictures of your speaker.
[…] are all sorts of challenges when you lip-read. Many are physical barriers, but often lighting can be a real problem. One pet hate is where I am sitting talking to someone […]
[…] are all sorts of challenges when you lip-read. Many are physical barriers, but often lighting can be a real problem. It can be too bright, too dark, too many shadows, or the […]
[…] week from now until the end of the year. I’ve talked before about some of the issues around black tie dinners for people who are hard of hearing and/or lip read. However, today I wanted to write about […]