“What makes a supermarket challenging I think is… just the noise… you can just hear everything, so you hear people, you hear like beeping, you hear like people pushing stuff, like you just hear everything. It’s very overwhelming.”
Sensory Street Participant
Our research and work with stakeholder suggested that autistic people find supermarkets to be one of the most disabling sensory environments, identifying a range of factors that may make them challenging spaces to be in.
On the 19-20th of August, we brought our Sensory Supermarket to PEARL in Dagenham in partnership with Sensory Spectacle. This event aimed to showcase our findings and explore how supermarkets can be disabling sensory environments for autistic people.
As part of this event we shared perspectives from autistic people from our focus groups as well as our research findings. This included our principles of sensory environments as well as more information about locations that are more or less disabling. We hope our immersive event showed individuals and businesses how they can make locations more enabling and accessible for autistic people.
Below, you can watch the videos about our project and the Sensory Supermarket and also preview and download the event materials.
Sensory Street 