Lachi / RAMPD

Disabled musicians and concertgoers use RAMPD's accessibility rider and consulting work to press venues, festivals, and award shows into building accommodations before doors open, rather than scrambling to retrofit after disabled people arrive.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Design Accessible Experiences
• Builder-side Interventions → Provide Support Channels

What it is

Abbey White reported in The Hollywood Reporter in January 2022 that RAMPD (Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities) launched with a virtual event at the Grammy Museum Experience Prudential Center, positioning the organization as the first industry coalition built to shift live entertainment from symbolic gestures toward structural requirement-setting for disability access.¹ Chris Eggertsen reported in Billboard the same month that RAMPD aimed to change how disabled musicians were perceived, moving the industry past what Eggertsen described as a default of "inspirational tokenism" and toward recognition of disabled artists as competitive professionals.²

Lachi, a legally blind Black EDM artist and songwriter born with coloboma to Nigerian immigrant parents, founded RAMPD in May 2021 after moderating a 2019 Recording Academy New York Chapter panel on accessibility revealed a vacuum. That panel marked Lachi's first public appearance using her white cane. Afterward, disabled musicians flooded her inbox seeking direction, and the volume of those messages exposed what no industry body had addressed. Musicians with disabilities had no shared infrastructure for advancing accessibility demands. Lachi co-founded the organization with Gaelynn Lea, a violinist and songwriter who uses a wheelchair, and a leadership team of disabled female musicians including Precious Perez, who became RAMPD's president. RAMPD launched formally in January 2022, fiscally sponsored by Accessible Festivals, and partnered with the Recording Academy, Live Nation, Netflix, the National Independent Venue Association (NIVA), and the American Association of Independent Music.²

RAMPD operates on two fronts. The accessibility rider gives concert organizers and booking agents a checklist of accommodations that must be confirmed before an event proceeds. These include visible ramps for stage and audience mobility access, ASL interpretation with dedicated on-screen interpreter windows for broadcasts, live captioning, audio description for visually impaired viewers, and alt text for promotional materials.¹ The RAMPD Stamp, developed with NIVA, certifies venues that exceed baseline ADA compliance, with renewal required every three years.³ On the awards-show side, RAMPD served as official advisor to the Recording Academy for the 65th Grammy Awards in February 2023. Abbey White reported in The Hollywood Reporter that the collaboration produced a stage ramp designed by Yellow Studio for the second consecutive year, ASL interpreters on the red carpet through Amber G Productions and LaVant Consulting, and live captioning on the secondary audio programming channel provided by VITAC.⁴ At the 66th Grammy Awards in February 2024, RAMPD brought in Roy Samuelsen, a voiceover artist and audio-description advocate, to deliver live visual descriptions of the telecast for blind viewers, marking the first time in CBS's broadcast history that the Grammy Awards carried audio description.⁵ RAMPD also hosted an invitation-only Grammy Week Inclusion Mixer in Hollywood that drew executives from Live Nation, Universal Music, BMI, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, embedding disability access conversations into the industry's annual networking calendar.

By June 2025, the Recording Academy elected Lachi to its 2025-2027 National Board of Trustees, making her the first openly disabled, blind, and neurodivergent person to hold that position.⁶ Joey Stuckey, a blind musician and engineer based in Atlanta, won re-election to the Atlanta chapter board the same cycle, and Shelby Lock, a neurodivergent mix engineer in Chicago, secured a Chicago chapter seat. RAMPD members moved disability advocacy from an external consulting role into the governance structure of the institution that produces the most-watched music event in the world.

RAMPD also partnered with the MIDI Association's Music Accessibility Standard Special Interest Group (MASSIG) to bring disabled musicians into early product design stages for music technology hardware and software.⁷ The partnership aimed to create what MASSIG described as accessibility settings that travel with the user across different gear and software devices, so that a blind producer's screen-reader configuration or a motor-impaired drummer's adapted MIDI mappings would persist from one product to the next. In November 2025, Lachi co-produced The Colors in My Mind, a New Age album by Chris Redding that featured Redding's nonverbal autistic son Christian and drew on Redding's own experiences with ADHD and synesthesia. The Recording Academy nominated the album for Best New Age, Ambient or Chant Album, making it the first Grammy-nominated album to feature a non-speaking autistic artist and making Lachi a co-producer on a Grammy-nominated record.⁸ In January 2026, Penguin Random House published Lachi's memoir I Identify as Blind through Phoebe Robinson's Tiny Reparations imprint, a book that reframed disability as a source of collective strength rather than individual deficit.⁹

Why it matters

Venue owners and architects built the live entertainment infrastructure of the twentieth century for standing, sighted, hearing, neurotypical audiences. Concert halls, amphitheaters, festival grounds, and club stages assumed a body that could climb stairs, tolerate strobe lighting, parse unamplified speech, and stand for hours in general-admission crowds. Architectural standards reflected the interests of builders who maximized revenue per square foot by designing for the largest possible undifferentiated audience, and the populations excluded from that design had no seat at the drafting table. The Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 mandated accessible seating, but it set a floor so low that a 1,000-seat venue needed only ten wheelchair spaces dispersed across the house.¹⁰ The ADA required that accessible tickets be sold through the same channels and at the same prices as general admission, but it did not require venues to publish accessibility information online, train front-of-house staff in accommodation procedures, or provide sensory accommodations for audience members with cognitive, neurological, or psychiatric disabilities. Attitude is Everything, a UK charity that monitors live music access, reported in its 2014 State of Access Report that 95 percent of Deaf and disabled respondents had encountered barriers when booking tickets, and that one-third of venues offered no access information on their websites at all.¹¹ RAMPD entered this inherited arrangement in 2022 as a professional network that could sit inside the industry's own institutions and press for requirement-setting that the law had left voluntary.

Disabled concertgoers and performers navigate a live entertainment industry organized around norms that treat their presence as exceptional. Erin Hawley, an accessibility consultant, told Alaina Leary for Rooted in Rights in 2018 that wheelchair seating at most venues allowed only one companion seat, a configuration that assumed disabled people attend events alone or in pairs but never in groups.¹² Karli Drew documented in Berklee Online in 2024 that accessible seating at many venues sat behind the stage or in obstructed-view locations, that reserved accessible seats cost more than standard tickets, and that companion ticket requirements effectively doubled the price of attendance for anyone who needed an aide.¹³ Gaelynn Lea, RAMPD's co-founder, described arriving at a New York City nightclub that had confirmed accessibility in advance only to find a snowmobile ramp too narrow and steep for her wheelchair, and no accessible restroom in the building. Lea told Songlines that when venues lack stage ramps she performs from the floor, and that in 2018 she stopped accepting bookings at inaccessible venues entirely because accommodating broken infrastructure gave venue operators no reason to fix it.¹⁴ The industry that produced these patterns lacked accessibility compliance departments at major festivals before 2013, and independent venues still routinely operate without dedicated staff for accommodations. Disabled fans who encounter these barriers endure inaccessibility or switch to alternatives, often by skipping events entirely. Disabled performers who accept bookings at inaccessible venues absorb the physical risk and the professional compromise of performing from positions the audience reads as diminished. RAMPD's rider attempts to interrupt that pattern at the planning stage, before the venue opens its doors and the burden falls on the attendee or the artist.

The economic structure of live entertainment concentrates the cost of accessibility on the people least able to absorb it. Venues treat accessible seating as a compliance cost rather than a revenue opportunity, allocating the minimum number of wheelchair spaces the ADA requires and pricing them into existing tiers without accounting for companion costs. A disabled concertgoer who needs an aide pays for two tickets. A wheelchair user assigned to an obstructed-view section pays full price for a diminished experience. The adaptation tax falls on disabled attendees, their families, and their aides, not on the promoters and venue operators who constructed the seating layout. Marta Russell argued in Beyond Ramps that capitalist market structures produce and maintain disability exclusion as a structural feature, because the cost of inclusion exceeds what the market rewards when disabled people are treated as a marginal audience segment.¹⁵ RAMPD's rider redistributes part of that cost by making accessibility a contractual obligation that promoters and venues must satisfy before the show, shifting expenditure from the attendee who would otherwise pay for human help or forgo the event to the builder who profits from the event's production. The RAMPD Stamp adds a certification mechanism, but participation remains voluntary, which means venues with the least economic margin, the independent clubs and small-capacity rooms where emerging artists perform, face the steepest cost-to-revenue ratio for compliance and the weakest incentive to pursue it.

Sins Invalid, the disability justice performance project founded in 2005 by Patricia Berne and Leroy F. Moore Jr., grounds its 10 Principles of Disability Justice in the premise that all bodies hold inherent worth and that cultural participation requires structural access rather than charitable invitation.¹⁶ Lachi's articulation of RAMPD's mission draws from that same lineage. In her interview with Daphne Wester at accessibility.com, Lachi described the objective as building conditions under which disabled musicians compete on equal terms, arguing that "once the world is built equally, then we can start to see who is good."¹⁷ Lachi told Grammy.com that she rejected the removal of the word "disability" from her identity, stating that taking "the dis out of disability" meant taking away her identity.¹⁸ That insistence on naming disability as identity rather than deficit positions RAMPD within the tradition that Alison Kafer theorized in Feminist, Queer, Crip, where Kafer argued that the "curative imaginary" organizes disability futures around elimination rather than access, and that disabled people's own visions of livable futures require structural change rather than individual correction.¹⁹ Lachi refused the inspirational narrative the entertainment industry defaults to when it encounters disabled performers. She named the structural barrier first and positioned RAMPD as an intervention in the conditions of competition, rather than a story of individual triumph over adversity. The Recording Academy's election of Lachi to its National Board of Trustees in 2025 marked the first time a disabled, blind, and neurodivergent person held governance authority over the institution that sets the Grammy Awards' operational standards, a shift from giving feedback from outside the room to setting requirements from inside it.

Disabled people excluded from live entertainment carry elevated rates of loneliness, social isolation, and the physiological damage those conditions produce. Emerson, Fortune, Llewellyn, and Stancliffe found in their 2020 cross-sectional study published in Disability and Health Journal that working-age adults with disability in England were 438 percent more likely to report loneliness and 51 percent more likely to report social isolation than nondisabled adults, even after controlling for age, sex, and socioeconomic position.²⁰ Gómez-Zúñiga, Pousada, and Armayones located the mechanism in social structures rather than in disability itself in their 2023 systematic review in Frontiers in Psychology, concluding that inaccessible environments and exclusion from leisure activities drove the differential rather than any pathological feature of disability.²¹ Holt-Lunstad, Smith, Baker, Harris, and Stephenson demonstrated in their 2015 meta-analysis in Perspectives on Psychological Science that social isolation increased mortality risk by 29 percent, an effect size comparable to established risk factors such as smoking and obesity, with no difference between objective and subjective measures of isolation.²² Chronic exclusion from cultural participation elevates cortisol through sustained social-evaluative threat, the stress response triggered when a person anticipates being devalued or rejected in a social context. Disabled people who skip concerts because the venue lacks accessible seating, who leave festivals early because sensory accommodations do not exist, or who abandon live music entirely because repeated failures exhaust the willingness to try again lose access to the social rituals through which communities form, identities consolidate, and belonging registers in the body as reduced inflammatory markers and improved immune function. The abandonment of accessible design in live entertainment follows excluded people home as elevated stress, diminished social networks, and compounding health risks that accumulate over years of foregone participation. That burden falls disproportionately on disabled people of color, disabled people in rural areas where fewer venues exist, and disabled people with low incomes who cannot absorb the adaptation tax of companion tickets and specialized transport.

RAMPD created the first industry-embedded infrastructure for pressing live entertainment toward accessibility before the event, rather than after the exclusion. The accessibility rider, the RAMPD Stamp, the Grammy Awards consulting work, and the MASSIG partnership each moved a specific cost from the disabled attendee or performer to the venue, promoter, broadcast operation, or product manufacturer that controlled the built environment. Lachi's election to the Recording Academy's Board of Trustees placed disability governance inside the institution rather than adjacent to it. The 2024 Grammy broadcast's first-ever audio description for blind viewers on CBS demonstrated that once a disabled professional held an advisory role, accommodations that broadcast networks had never attempted became operational within a single production cycle. Those gains rest on voluntary adoption. No federal statute requires venues to use an accessibility rider, no enforcement mechanism compels RAMPD Stamp renewal, and the Recording Academy's accessibility commitments depend on the priorities of successive boards. The gap between what the ADA mandates and what full participation requires defines the structural limit that RAMPD operates within, a gap that voluntary programs can narrow but cannot close without the legal and economic infrastructure that would make requirement-setting binding rather than elective.

Real-world examples

In the news

RAMPD Is on a Mission to Make the Music Industry's Events and Award Shows Accessible (January 2022)
-- Abbey White, The Hollywood Reporter

• White reported on RAMPD's launch and its two flagship programs. Lachi described the organization's purpose as getting disabled music professionals "into some of these rooms" where decisions about event design and production are made, rather than waiting for those rooms to issue invitations.¹

In the news

How the Recording Academy, RAMPD Expanded Accessibility and Disability Inclusion for the Grammys' L.A. Return (February 2023)
-- Abbey White, The Hollywood Reporter

• White documented the 65th Grammy Awards accessibility measures, including Yellow Studio's stage ramp, ASL interpreters on the red carpet produced by Amber G Productions, live captioning by VITAC, and sensory bags provided by KultureCity. The planned live audio description for the red carpet did not materialize, revealing the gap between announced commitments and delivered builder-side care.⁴

In the news

Music Professionals With Disabilities Have New Champion in Advocacy Organization RAMPD (January 2022)
-- Chris Eggertsen, Billboard

• Eggertsen reported on RAMPD's founding team and its positioning against the industry's habit of treating disabled musicians as "charity cases or simply sources of inspiration." Lachi, Gaelynn Lea, and the leadership team presented RAMPD as a professional network designed to shift disabled musicians from giving feedback to holding institutional authority.²

In the news

Artists with Disabilities Unite to Increase Visibility and Accessibility in the Music Industry (January 2022)
-- Daphne Wester, accessibility.com

• Wester interviewed Lachi on the conditions that led to RAMPD's founding, including the discovery after a Recording Academy panel that disabled musicians lacked shared infrastructure for advancing accessibility demands. Lachi described the objective as leveling conditions of competition rather than soliciting accommodation.¹⁷

• Attitude is Everything's 2014 State of Access Report found that 95 percent of Deaf and disabled respondents had encountered barriers when booking tickets to live music events in the UK, and that one-third of venue websites provided no disability access information at all.¹¹
• By 2025, Live Nation reported that 25 of its venues across the U.S. and Canada had achieved sensory-inclusive certification from KultureCity, providing sensory bags with noise-canceling headphones, fidget tools, and communication cards at no cost to attendees.²³
• ADCOLOR named Lachi its Innovator of the Year in 2024 for RAMPD's work embedding disability access into music industry infrastructure.²⁴
• USA Today named Lachi a 2024 Woman of the Year, and Forbes included her on its 2025 Accessibility 100 list, recognition that positioned RAMPD's work inside mainstream editorial coverage rather than disability-sector media alone.
• RAMPD partnered with the MIDI Association's MASSIG in 2024 to bring disabled musicians into early product design for music technology hardware and software, aiming to create accessibility preferences that persist across gear and software rather than requiring reconfiguration each time a producer switches equipment.⁷
• Lachi published I Identify as Blind through Penguin Random House's Tiny Reparations imprint in January 2026, a memoir that Kirkus Reviews called "a provocative invitation to rethink what it means to be disabled."⁹

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the requirement-setting and design level involves embedding accessibility into the production timeline before the show opens:

• "The rider goes out with the contract. If the venue cannot confirm ramp access, captioning, and ASL by load-in, we do not book the show."
• "We built the ramp into the stage design from the first render. It was never an add-on."
• "Every seat map we publish includes accessible seating locations, companion seat options, and a direct line to our access coordinator."
• "We trained front-of-house, security, and box office staff on accommodation procedures before the season started, not after a complaint."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect treats disability access as an edge case that can wait until someone asks:

• "We meet ADA minimums. That is all we are required to do."
• "We have ten accessible seats in a 5,000-seat house. That has never been a problem."
• "The ramp is in the back. It gets them in the building."
• "We do not have the budget for ASL interpreters at every show. If someone requests one, we will look into it."
• "Our ticketing platform does not support accessible seat selection online. They can call the box office during business hours."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor disabled concertgoers and musicians carry when venues treat accessibility as optional:

• "I called the venue three times to ask whether the accessible entrance was step-free. Nobody could tell me. I brought a friend who could carry my chair down stairs if it came to that."
• "The accessible section was behind a pillar. I paid full price and watched the show on the overhead monitor."
• "I bought two tickets because my aide needs a seat, but we ended up separated because the companion seat was already sold to someone who did not need it."
• "I stopped going to shows at that venue. The last time I went, they told me at the door that the accessible entrance was locked and I would have to go around the building."
• "I emailed the festival three months before to ask about sensory accommodations. They never responded. I went anyway and left after forty minutes because the strobe lights triggered a migraine."

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All observations occur within the context of the U.S. and UK live entertainment industries, where RAMPD operates as the first professional coalition to embed disability access requirements into the contractual, operational, and governance infrastructure of music industry institutions.

Footnotes

1. Abbey White, "RAMPD Is on a Mission to Make the Music Industry's Events and Award Shows Accessible," The Hollywood Reporter, January 22, 2022. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lifestyle/lifestyle-news/rampd-music-award-shows-events-disability-accessibility-1235077364/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

2. Chris Eggertsen, "Music Professionals With Disabilities Have New Champion in Advocacy Organization RAMPD," Billboard, January 21, 2022. https://www.billboard.com/business/business-news/rampd-music-disability-advocacy-launch-1235021234/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. "Recording Artists and Music Professionals with Disabilities (RAMPD)," Zero Project, 2023. https://zeroproject.org/view/project/0a097f59-91ab-4521-936a-6423bdd0f111 ↩

4. Abbey White, "How the Recording Academy, RAMPD Expanded Accessibility and Disability Inclusion for the Grammys' L.A. Return," The Hollywood Reporter, February 6, 2023. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/music-news/grammys-2023-recording-academy-accessibility-disability-inclusion-1235314953/ ↩ ↩²

5. "RAMPD at the 2024 GRAMMYs," RAMPD.org, February 2024. https://rampd.org/article/rampd-at-the-2024-grammys ↩

6. "RAA+D And RAMPD: Recording Academy Leaders On Disability, Neurodivergence & Inclusivity In Music," GRAMMY.com, July 22, 2025. https://www.grammy.com/news/disability-pride-roundtable-raad-rampd-accessibility-visibility ↩

7. "RAMPD + MASSIG: Turning Music Accessibility Into Real-World Standards," MIDI.org, 2024. https://midi.org/rampd-massig-turning-music-accessibility-into-real-world-standards ↩ ↩²

8. "Chris Redding's Colors in My Mind Makes History, Amplifying Neurodivergent Voices," OpenPR, November 2025. https://www.openpr.com/news/4382984/chris-redding-s-colors-in-my-mind-makes-history-amplifying ↩

9. Lachi with Tim Vandehey, I Identify as Blind: A Brazen Celebration of Disability Culture, Identity, and Power (New York: Tiny Reparations/Penguin Random House, 2026). https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/761599/i-identify-as-blind-by-lachi-with-tim-vandehey/ ↩ ↩²

10. "ADA Requirements: Ticket Sales," ADA.gov. https://www.ada.gov/resources/ticket-sales/ ↩

11. Attitude is Everything, State of Access Report 2014. https://attitudeiseverything.org.uk/industry/welcoming-disabled-audiences/state-of-access-reports/ ↩ ↩²

12. Alaina Leary, "28 Years After the ADA, Disabled People Are Still Fighting for Accessible Event Seating," Rooted in Rights, July 24, 2018. https://rootedinrights.org/28-years-after-the-ada-disabled-people-are-still-fighting-for-accessible-event-seating/ ↩

13. Karli Drew, "Amping Up Accessibility in Live Music," Berklee Online Take Note, March 6, 2024. https://online.berklee.edu/takenote/amping-up-accessibility-in-live-music/ ↩

14. "Gaelynn Lea: 'If a venue doesn't have a ramp for the stage, I'm playing on the floor,'" Songlines, 2023. https://www.songlines.co.uk/features/gaelynn-lea-if-a-venue-doesn-t-have-a-ramp-for-the-stage-i-m-playing-on-the-floor ↩

15. Marta Russell, Beyond Ramps: Disability at the End of the Social Contract (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1998). ↩

16. Sins Invalid, "10 Principles of Disability Justice," 2015. https://sinsinvalid.org/10-principles-of-disability-justice/ ↩

17. Daphne Wester, "Artists with Disabilities Unite to Increase Visibility and Accessibility in the Music Industry," accessibility.com, January 26, 2022. https://www.accessibility.com/blog/artists-with-disabilities-unite-to-increase-visibility-and-accessibility-in-the-music-industry ↩ ↩²

18. "Recording Artist And Accessibility Advocate Lachi Talks Disability Empowerment And Celebrating Blindness Through Music And Beyond," GRAMMY.com, October 2024. https://www.grammy.com/news/lachi-interview-accessibility-advocate-disability-empowerment-national-disability-employment-awareness-month-blindness-awareness-month ↩

19. Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013). ↩

20. Eric Emerson, Nick Fortune, Gwynnyth Llewellyn, and Roger Stancliffe, "Loneliness, social support, social isolation and wellbeing among working age adults with and without disability: Cross sectional study," Disability and Health Journal 14, no. 1 (2021): 100965. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7403030/ ↩

21. Beni Gómez-Zúñiga, Modesta Pousada, and Manuel Armayones, "Loneliness and disability: A systematic review of loneliness conceptualization and intervention strategies," Frontiers in Psychology 13 (2023): 1040651. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1040651 ↩

22. Julianne Holt-Lunstad, Timothy B. Smith, Mark Baker, Tyler Harris, and David Stephenson, "Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality: A Meta-Analytic Review," Perspectives on Psychological Science 10, no. 2 (2015): 227-237. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691614568352 ↩

23. "Concert Venues Increasingly Going Sensory-Friendly," Disability Scoop, July 22, 2025. https://www.disabilityscoop.com/2025/07/22/concert-venues-increasingly-going-sensory-friendly/31547/ ↩

24. "ADCOLOR Announces Winners of the 18th Annual ADCOLOR Awards," PR Newswire, November 2024. https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/adcolor-announces-winners-of-the-18th-annual-adcolor-awards-302307724.html ↩