Accessibility at Disney Parks

Disney parks are at the forefront of accessibility for guests with disabilities. As we create new attractions or enhance existing ones, careful consideration is given to providing appropriate access so that virtually all of our Guests can enjoy the experience.

From handheld captioning to accessible-ride vehicles to sloped-entry swimming pools, Disney Imagineers and engineers challenge themselves to create many experiences everyone can enjoy. At the world-famous Jungle Cruise attraction, for example, ride engineers created a special lift inside several boats to allow access for Guests who previously would have had to transfer from their wheelchairs to the ride seat.

Park attractions, like Expedition Everest, are designed to accommodate the needs of a wide range of Guests.

Jungle Cruise and other Walt Disney World Resort and Disneyland Resort attractions also offer handheld captioning through an innovative device. A handheld receiver, enables Guests to read captions while enjoying specific theme park attractions where captioning previously was impractical or unattainable. To develop the handheld system, Disney engineers took recent advances in wireless communication one step further. Since an off-the-shelf solution was not available, Disney engineers developed their own. We are now exploring opportunities to make this patented technology available in venues outside of theme parks, where it could provide synchronized captioning, audio translations and other services in a wide variety of applications such as museums and movie theaters.

Walt Disney World Resort is also launching a service known as audio description. This service provides narrated information about key visual elements in our attractions such as actions, settings and scene changes for Guests with vision disabilities. From the moment guests step into an attraction, they are given rich detail of their surroundings and become immediately involved in the attraction experience.

Audio description joins several existing services for Guests with hearing and visual disabilities, including reflective captioning, sign language interpretation, assistive listening systems, video captioning, Braille maps and audio walking tours.