PI Events App

BSL events were everywhere — and nowhere

PI deliver British and Irish Sign Language access at over 600 live events a year. Arsenal. Wembley. The O2. Royal Albert Hall. Live Nation. Festival Republic. The work was happening; the audiences couldn't find it.

Information sat scattered across organiser websites, ticketing platforms and venue accessibility teams that didn't talk to each other. And when an event didn't have interpreter access yet, requesting it was friction-heavy: work out who to email, find the contact, draft the message, follow up. Most Deaf attendees gave up before they started.

PI brought us a brief shaped by that reality. Build something that closes the loop.

A consumer app, free at the point of use, BSL-first by design

The constraints were sharp and they drove every engineering decision:

• Centralise every PI-delivered interpreted event into one searchable place.
• Let users request access at non-PI events with the fewest possible taps.
• Provide communication tools for the day — not just discovery.
• BSL & ISL first. Every screen has a signed video. Onboarding picks language before any English appears on screen.
• Work offline. Venue Wi-Fi is unreliable; the app cannot be.
• Native iOS and Android. Not a web wrapper. Native feel on both platforms.

Live demos from the shipped build

Short clips of the actual flows running on App Store and Play Store today — AI-drafted access requests, the Communication Tool Kit, push for nearby interpreted events, and sign-language video on every screen.

Six features, one loop closed

The app is small on purpose. Every screen earns its place against the brief. No upsells, no dashboards the user didn't ask for, no analytics scaffolding leaking into the experience.

Browse interpreted events

Every PI-delivered BSL and ISL event nationwide, filterable by category. Cached offline the moment the app opens on Wi-Fi.

Smart search

Type-ahead fuzzy search across events, venues and categories. Forgives spelling and surfaces venues when you misremember the act.

Request an interpreter killer

Event details in, AI-drafted request email out, venue address autofilled, send with a few taps. Hours of research collapsed into a single screen.

Communication Tool Kit

I am Deaf, Emergency, My Order, Speech to Text — customisable cards plus a live speech-to-text mode for the bar, security, or an emergency.

BSL & ISL on every screen

Marie Pascall signs the guidance herself. Sign language is the primary content here, not subtitles bolted on top of English.

The MY ORDER card

The single most distinctive screen in the app — a turquoise card to show staff at the bar. Users showed each other this one first.

Native on both platforms, offline by default

Built for App Store and Play Store distribution from one shared TypeScript codebase using Capacitor, with native platform integrations where it mattered — push, local storage, hardware mic for speech-to-text, deep links from venue emails back into the request flow.

The engineering decisions that came straight from the brief

• BSL-first onboarding. Language choice happens before any English text appears on screen. A real constraint — not a cosmetic flag — that ripples through routing, the splash sequence, and every translation file.
• Offline-first events. Event data is cached on first load and re-validated in the background. The Tool Kit cards are stored locally; they work in the foyer of a venue with zero bars.
• AI-drafted request emails. The killer feature. Event details in, ready-to-send email out, venue address autofilled, sender stays in the loop with full edit control before send.
• Push for nearby interpreted events. Opt-in notifications for newly confirmed events near the user — the part PI's audience kept asking for and the part that closes the discovery loop.
• Native chrome on both platforms. Bottom-tab navigation on iOS, material patterns on Android. One codebase, two genuinely native-feeling apps.

Shipped, in pockets, and recommended by the community first

The signal we cared about most was the first one. The app was peer-recommended at DeafExpo 2026 by Deaf attendees themselves — community validation that no marketing spend can buy. Press followed naturally. The full PI Events App press kit is live and being used by journalists writing about the launch.

For PI, the app turns a decade of delivered BSL events into a single discoverable surface and gives Deaf audiences a tool they can hand to a venue when access doesn't yet exist. For Tailored Tools, it's the proof point we point at when a small business asks whether we can ship something native, accessible and genuinely useful — not just a marketing site.

Performance Interpreting

Performance Interpreting is the UK and Ireland's leading provider of BSL and ISL access at live events, founded by Marie Pascall — born with unilateral deafness, inducted into Signature's Hall of Fame, and the interpreter who gave key evidence in the landmark Little Mix BSL case that helped establish BSL access as a legal requirement under the Equality Act 2010.

PI deliver interpreter coverage at over 600 live events a year — for Arsenal, Wembley Stadium, The O2, Royal Albert Hall, Live Nation, Festival Republic, BBC, UEFA and the NFL among others. The PI Events App sits alongside the rest of the agency's digital estate — see the full Performance Interpreting portfolio entry for the wider picture.