Exercises: Guest Experience and Accessibility
Part A recall · Part B application · Part C field work · Part D critique · Part M mixed review · Part E extension.
Starred (★) problems have worked answers in appendices/answers-to-selected.md.
Part A — Recall and Comprehension
A.1 ★ State the disclosure problem and give all four of its reasons.
A.2 Where does a guest's event begin and end? Why does that matter?
A.3 Describe the guest walk: when, how, carrying what, recording what.
A.4 ★ List the eleven friction points in order. Which five take half the friction and none of the budget?
A.5 Name the four kinds of access and, for each, what actually matters most.
A.6 Give the six mobility numbers.
A.7 ★ Why does "do you have any special requirements?" fail? Be precise about the mechanism.
A.8 Name the four things the working script does.
A.9 What is universal design's practical argument, and why is it stronger than the moral one?
A.10 ★ What is the cheapest accessibility measure in this chapter, roughly what does it cost, and who does it serve besides its intended group?
A.11 Name the four dietary handoffs. Which one fails, and what closes it?
A.12 What are the four rules of wayfinding, and which sign is most often missing?
A.13 ★ State the notice ranking's four rows with two examples each.
A.14 What does "hospitality is noticed and decoration is not" claim, and what does it explicitly not claim?
A.15 What does an unaccompanied guest lack, and what is the fix?
A.16 ★ Name five things the seating chart is doing besides seating people.
A.17 Why does asking a guest on the day whether everything is all right not work? What replaces it?
A.18 What three things do elders need that are free and not on a standard run sheet?
A.19 ★ Of a hundred adult guests, roughly how many have some hearing loss and roughly how many use a wheelchair? What follows from the ratio?
A.20 Why is a "children's entertainer" not a substitute for the four things that work?
Part B — Application
B.1 ★ Take a venue you know and write its eleven friction points, with the specific failure at each.
B.2 Rewrite this, so that people answer it: "Please advise us of any dietary requirements or accessibility needs by 1 August." Under 150 words, and state what each sentence is doing.
B.3 A 90-guest wedding, church ceremony, hotel reception. 32 guests are over sixty-five. Write the access plan, four kinds, with costs.
B.4 ★ Design the arrival sequence for a rural venue with a 600-metre gravel drive and one small car park. Include what goes in the invitation and what happens on the day.
B.5 Write the departure plan for a venue with no phone signal, an unlit track, and a 10:30 finish. Everything, including what is printed and where.
B.6 A guest is Deaf and uses BSL/ASL. What do you do, when, and what does it cost? Include what you ask them.
B.7 ★ A couple has $1,800 left. Give them four options across the notice ranking's rows, rank them, and write what you say when they choose the one you ranked last.
B.8 Redesign a seating-chart display that currently is: one board, 14-point, at the tent door, grouped by table. Fix everything and say what each fix is for.
B.9 Write the pre-wedding information sheet for a September barn wedding: outdoor ceremony, gravel, no signal, minibus at 10:45. Everything a guest needs, in under 400 words.
B.10 ★ Cost a complete guest-experience package for 110 guests: shuttle, printed programmes with vows, thirty extra chairs, a quiet room, late food, a greeter, and someone at the seating chart. Give a realistic total and say which items are $0.
B.11 A wedding has three guests attending alone who know nobody. Design the intervention. It should take under five minutes of anybody's time.
B.12 ★ Walk a floor plan you have and mark every place a guest must choose a direction. At each, say what they can see.
B.13 Write the rehearsal sentences — the actual words — that assign: the greeter, the seating-chart person, the walker-out for an elderly guest, and the person who looks after a guest attending alone.
B.14 A venue is described as "fully accessible." Write the eight questions you ask to find out whether that is true.
Part C — Field and Practice
C.1 ★ Do a guest walk at any venue, in order, from the car park, carrying nothing. Record hesitations only. Report how many you found and how many appear on the floor plan.
C.2 Do the same walk again after dark. Report the difference.
C.3 Go to a public event as a guest and count your own friction points. Be honest about the ones you attributed to yourself.
C.4 ★ Ask five people who have been to a wedding in the last year whether anything was difficult. Then ask a specific question — about parking, or hearing, or food. Report the difference in what you get.
C.5 Measure the gap between two tables at a set event. Report whether it is 36 inches.
C.6 Find the accessible toilet at three venues and measure the distance from the main space. Report all three.
C.7 ★ Read your own or a colleague's guest information and find every sentence that asks a guest to classify themselves. Rewrite each.
C.8 Attend something alone. Note every point at which you did not know what to do, and how long the worst gap was.
Part D — Critique and Judgment
D.1 §29.2 claims the absence of complaints is evidence of nothing. That is a strong claim. Under what conditions would silence actually be evidence of a good experience? Do those conditions ever hold at a wedding?
D.2 ★ The chapter says to ask rather than provide. A guest could reasonably say that being asked is itself a burden — that they would rather arrive somewhere that worked than be interviewed about their body. Argue that position, then say what survives of §29.5.
D.3 ★ The notice ranking in §29.8 is the author's, has no data, and will change what readers spend money on. Attack it. Name at least two rows you think are placed wrongly and say what evidence would settle it.
D.4 §29.8 concedes that the couple can see the flowers in photographs forever and cannot see the six chairs. Does that concession undercut the section's argument, or complete it?
D.5 ★ The chapter treats "walk it as somebody else — in heels, with a stick, pushing a pram" as a technique. A disabled reader might find this simulation exercise objectionable, and there is a real literature saying disability simulation produces worse attitudes rather than better. Engage with that, and say what you would do instead.
D.6 §29.2a's population figures are explicitly Tier 3 order-of-magnitude estimates. Is a rough number better or worse than no number here? Argue it, and consider what a planner does differently with each.
D.7 ★ Ceclia Adeyemi's list in the opening includes five failures. Rank them by how much they actually damaged her day, and then say whether your ranking matches the notice ranking in §29.8. If it does not, which is wrong?
D.8 The chapter recommends a greeter, a seating-chart person, a walker-out, and a named person for guests attending alone — four jobs, all given to family members. Chapter 24 warned about over-assignment and Chapter 22 watched it happen to Elena Reyes. Has this chapter just recreated the problem?
Part M — Mixed Review
M.1 ★ (Ch.11) What does the 36-inch rule protect, and who discovers when it is broken?
M.2 (Ch.19) Name three pieces of Chapter 19's output that this chapter makes load-bearing.
M.3 (Ch.14) Where in the four handoffs did Ceclia's vegetarian meal fail, and what one sentence at the rehearsal would have caught it?
M.4 ★ (Ch.27) Why can the sweep find what asking cannot? Give its route and say which two stops are for this chapter.
M.5 (Ch.28) The rain plan puts the ceremony in the barn. What does that do to guest experience — name one thing that gets better and two that get worse.
M.6 ★ (Ch.15) Between 15 and 25 of a hundred guests are not drinking. What did Chapter 15 say about that, and what does this chapter add?
M.7 (Ch.18) Sound is the commonest unmet access need. Which of Chapter 18's decisions matters most for it, and which is irrelevant?
M.8 (Ch.20) A 36-minute outdoor ceremony with fourteen guests over seventy. What would this chapter change about it?
M.9 ★ (Ch.24) This chapter assigns four new named jobs. Apply Chapter 24's rule and check whether any person now has two jobs at the same minute.
M.10 (Ch.16) Chapter 16 built a design argument. Does §29.8's ranking contradict it? Reconcile them in three sentences.
Part E — Extension and Synthesis
E.1 ★ Research the actual accessibility law that applies where you work — for a private event, not a public accommodation. Report what is required, what is not, and where the gap between legal and decent sits.
E.2 Design an information instrument better than the RSVP question. It should get more disclosure with less burden, and you should say how you would test whether it worked.
E.3 ★ Read something written by disabled people about attending weddings — blogs, forums, first-person accounts, not industry guidance. Report three things that appear there and nowhere in this chapter.
E.4 Build a guest-experience audit instrument a venue could use on itself. One page. Then test it on a venue and report what it missed.
E.5 ★ §29.8 claims hospitality is noticed and decoration is not. Design the study that would settle it — sampling, timing, what you ask, and how you would avoid the disclosure problem contaminating your own data. The last part is the hard part.
E.6 Write 800 words on the tension between a wedding as the couple's aesthetic expression and as an event hosted for a hundred people. Use this chapter and Chapter 16, take a position, and concede what your position costs.
📐 Mini-Project
Do a complete guest-experience plan for one real event.
- Walk it. Twice — daylight and dark — and once more with furniture in
- Write the eleven friction points, assessed, with what you found
- Rewrite the asking, and if you can, send it
- Build the access plan, four kinds
- Cost the interventions, and mark the ones that are $0
- Assign the names — greeter, chart, walkers-out, alone-guests — and check against Chapter 24 for collisions
Then, afterwards: ask three specific questions of three specific guests. Not "how was it." Compare what you get with what you predicted, and write down every gap.