On the Treadmill of Accessibility
Hello Readers!
Some of my blogs, to date, have focussed specifically on the needs of individuals with disabilities. In this month's blog, I’d like to extend the conversation and talk about inclusion. There’s a big difference between accessibility and inclusion. To illustrate, I’m going to borrow from a colleague who used the following analogy to demonstrate this difference. Consider, for a moment, a high school dance. The school is relatively new and it has been built with accessibility top of mind. Great! People who use wheelchairs, for example, will have no problem getting into the dance, but will they be asked to dance?
As a society, we are learning more and more about how to build infrastructure with accessibility in mind, but do these changes promote inclusion? Elaborating on the above example, I recently attended a dance event in Vancouver. Three members of the ten or so person dance troop were in wheelchairs. The dancers used different ways of including the wheelchair performers. They also described what was happening to the audience. For me, this was an example of a truly inclusive event!
This past January, I spent a few days in Toronto. I wanted to continue my training while I was there, so I looked for a facility with a treadmill. I found a nearby, newly renovated City of Toronto recreation complex. It had been open for about a year. As far as I could tell, the facility was wheelchair accessible. There were no stairs to get into the building and there was an elevator to get upstairs to the gym. The washrooms looked spacious and the locker bays had both upper and lower levels, which was great design for wheelchair users!
The same thought had not been put into how the treadmills could facilitate all users. They had flat screens only, no tactile markings of any kind or levers that could be pushed up or down to increase and decrease speed or to adjust elevation. This is a common situation and I wasn't completely surprised, except that it was a brand-new facility, which could've been designed with complete inclusion in mind.
So, there I was, waiting each time for staff to affix some temporary Scotch Tape markers on the treadmill before I could use it. By my third visit, my patience ran out. As the facility staff person was putting the tape on the treadmill that I had waited at least 30 minutes to use I said, "I’m surprised that this is a new facility and there are no accessible treadmills". There was a definite pause before the person asked, "Would you like to speak to my supervisor about that?” "Yes," I said cheerfully.
Once we started to chat, the city staff member responded with two lines of defense: "This was the inventory we were given" and, "... we have until 2025 to be compliant". Let's unpack that latter statement. The Accessibility for Ontarians With Disabilities Act (AODA) came into force in 2005, requiring accessibility to facilities, like the one I was at, by 2025. The Act has been in place for 15 years and what I was hearing was that this facility still had another 5 years before they were breaking the law? This is a fundamental difference between access and inclusion. I have no way of knowing if this was the case here, but accessibility is sometimes implemented only to achieve legislative compliance, a type of "accessibility treadmill" where we keep trying to catch up on the accessibility agenda - forgetting that what we really should be doing is running full tilt toward an inclusive society.
I would argue that the intent of this accessibility legislation is to ensure inclusivity in the first place; but, because that "horse has already left the barn" a long time ago, the 20-year implementation timeframes set by the AODA, and now in the Accessible Canada Act, allow businesses and governments to play catch up.
The other point the supervisor made was that this was the inventory they were given. To me, this points to a budget issue. For some reason, no investment was made in new, accessible treadmills, so the city simply put in older ones that they had in their inventory. Now, they still have just under five years to figure it out!
Ok, enough harping. I think by now you see my point! When we don't design our policies, programs, facilities and workplaces to be inclusive from the onset, we run the risk of sending a message to people that they are not included or not welcome - when they aren’t made to feel included.
I agree that access and inclusion can't happen overnight, but it’s a matter of thinking in ways which are inclusive, then rolling them out accordingly. It seems counter-intuitive that inclusion should be a mind-set that we have to learn, but there it is. We are all products of our culture and we suffer from unconscious bias. However, when we adopt the mindset to be inclusive right out of the gates, then things change. If your facility had 20 years to change, do you think you’d be motivated to start tomorrow?
It does take tools and resources to understand our bias, but in the end, it’s worth it when we can say we are truly welcoming and inclusive from the start.
Written by: Peter Field
Edited by: Drew Skitt, bloomcontent.ca