1 Scope and Focus

The Institute for Community Prosperity conducts a range of ‘scans’ that look at contemporary social problems and other challenges of societal or community concern.  We do this for a variety of reasons:

• Sense-making: To distill a wide array of insights, perspectives, and approaches to complex topics in one ‘place’, so that the public, students and many different kinds of practitioners, can get ‘up to speed’ on the topic.  As such, the scans might be less useful to those living with, or working on, the challenge.
• Permeability: To provide permeability between academic insight and practice.  Academic research is often paywalled and difficult to access for practitioners.  At the same time, this scan serves as a primer for issues, players, and other aspects of policies and practice that may be useful for students and researchers to understand the broader context in which their work could contribute.
• Open access innovation: To provide an open access resource that we hope will be helpful for other organizations and changemakers embarking on research and development, policy development, program design, or systems analyses of their own.

This particular scan is organized starting with general CONTEXT – concepts, terminology, demographics, intersecting issues, followed by FRAMEWORKS for understanding accessibility – design, public policy, non-government organizations, etc., and finally DOMAINS – specific subtopics, realms of action, and examples of innovation.

For the purposes of this scan, we are interested in helping inform public understanding about how Canada as a society can maximize accessibility in all aspects of adult life, work, and play.  The central question driving this scan – How might we maximize accessibility to promote human flourishing? – can be framed more vividly:

How might we maximize access to society’s technologies, institutions, structures, and opportunities such that adult citizens living with disabilities feel welcomed and included, and – with minimum friction – can contribute and exercise their talents, choices, citizenship, career opportunities, and entrepreneurial action to act on their desires, preferences, and dreams?

Each person’s understanding of accessibility is in relation to their particular attempted ‘entry point’ to an activity or opportunity.  It can be a digital entry point – hearing feedback from some users that a website does not have sufficient contrast, readable font, or multiple means of navigability.  Some people think about accessibility in the context of assistive engineered devices, or perhaps with respect to architectural or landscape design.  For still others, accessibility is mainly about economic or workplace exclusion, or participation in community, recreational, cultural, or civic life.  For many adults living with disabilities, a combination of these situations (and more) are entry points to either experience or learn about accessibility.

It is also vital to think about accessibility through connections, broader patterns, and trends, as well as underlying root causes, deeper blockages, and leverage points for change.  There are also intersections with other aspects of an individual’s identity which can also affect accessibility – age, gender, language, or race, for example.^[1] This scan does not aim to expressly cover how other equity-seeking identities experience access. It does, however, occasionally surface some examples of how intersectionality interacts with accessibility. Consider, for example, that according to the Disabled Women Network of Canada, “persons with mental or behavioural disabilities experience personal victimization at a rate four times that of the rate of people who have none”, or that “”60% of women with disabilities are likely to experience some form of violence in the course of their adult lives.”^[2]   Also, where there is overlap with issues, trends and innovations relating to older adults or seniors, this scan generally does not go into detail, as this was covered under the Aging and Thriving Scan commissioned by ATCO and produced by the Institute for Community Prosperity in 2021.^[3]

This scan covers many topics related to accessibility, including basic context-setting overall trends (e.g. demographic trends, shifts in societal attitudes and language, trends in public support, employment, technology and so on).  The scan peers into policy and legal frameworks in Canada.  It also explores deeper cultural biases and dynamics (e.g. ableism), inclusive and universal design frameworks, and a range of contemporary issues being raised by, and innovations being designed or led by, people with disabilities.

The scan crosses many domains, from adaptive technologies, to urban planning and design, to corporate Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) and environmental, social, and (corporate) governance (“ESG”^[4]) approaches; to inclusive sport, civil society actors, and new frameworks like ‘crip futures’ thinking.  We will look at the role of a range of players – accessibility exemplars and potential catalysts or enablers.  The scan also highlights terminology and concepts that relate to accessibility throughout.  Perhaps most importantly, the scan highlights various system qualities, failures, gaps, and vulnerabilities, as well as potential leverage points for systems change.

While the scan focuses mainly on a Canada-wide context, many international contexts, organizations and innovations are included, and many sections include additional references to the local or regional context in Calgary and Alberta, where the Institute and ATCO are both based.