07 Nov Southend’s Royals Shopping Centre gets behind UK’s first ever ‘disabled shopping day’
The Royals Shopping Centre is supporting the UK’s first ever accessible shopping day, created to recognise the importance and needs of disabled consumers and promote inclusive shopping
Backed by the Government and major High Street names – including Argos, Asda, Sainsbury’s, and Marks & Spencer – the inaugural Purple Tuesday will take place on Tuesday 13th November.
The Royals Shopping Centre will join retailers across the country – and online – introducing new measures to make shopping more inclusive for customers who have both physical and hidden disabilities.
The Royals is taking a lead in helping people with Auditory Processing Disorder (APD) to have a far more enjoyable shopping experience by turning off the piped music in the centre’s atrium and also turning off the hand dryers in the toilets.
APD is a hearing problem where the brain is unable to process sounds in the normal way. As the interior of The Royals is almost exclusively a series of hard surfaces, sound is reflected more starkly, making it difficult for people with APD to filter background noise and understand speech, or concentrate when background noise levels are high. In some cases, this can lead to difficulty understanding and remembering instructions, as well as difficulty speaking clearly and problems with reading and spelling.
