The latest Let’s Play project will provide kids under 7 with sport wheelchairs, accessible facilities to play in and guidance for facilitators to deliver programs to these kids. My role is to make sure kids throughout the province have an opportunity to apply for these chairs and facilities and programs are in place once they have access to them.

This program is targeted at kids under 7 who are able to independently use a manual wheelchair to participate in physical activity. If you are intersted (parents of kids with disabilities or organizations that provide services to kids in this target group) please contact me at mike @ everyone included (dot) com.

A: accessible, adaptable, agile
The basics of delivering an accessible experience is obviously to be accessible. There are a lot of standards out there to use as a guide for the built environment (in BC, there’s a readily available Building Code booklet focusing just on accessibility). Being accessible for everyone in every situation, however, isn’t always so easy. In these cases being adaptable and agile (flexibility) can make up for some shortcomings that you may not be able to address in the short run.

E: everyone, experiences, excellence
Broadening and deepening your customer base isn’t as scary and expensive as you might think. Building experiences for everyone that ensures a similar level of excellence does require strategic thinking. The seamless experience life cycle is a good place to start.

I: inclusive, independent, innovative
Again, at the heart of providing equal experiences for all is to have an all-inclusive mind set. This requires a customer eyed view with the idea of, could someone enjoy this independently. Too often businesses will be happy with the idea that we can help but that can be stigmatizing so, where possible, people should be able to experience your products and services with little or no assistance. This may require some innovative thinking. Sometimes this is as simple as signage, service training or better website design.

O: open, organizational DNA, operable
Before you even go down the accessibility and inclusion you really need to be open to making change and open to seeing the benefits of going down this path. You will want to weave this into your organizational DNA. It should start with your executive, trickle through to management and shine with your front line workers. All of this needs to lead to operable solutions for both you and, more importantly, for the customer.

U: universal design, ubiquitous, understanding
The principles of accessible and inclusive environments in universal design. You can find many resources to guide you through the 7 principles of universal design. If you bring someone to help your business, make sure they incorporate these principles in everything they do. It should be everywhere (ubiquitous) so that your customer isn’t surprised by insurmountable barriers along the way. This understanding comes from talking to your customer to hear their insights.

Sometimes y: you
Sometimes it is about you. Is a change economically feasible? Does this bring your strategic plan to life? But in the end, it’s mostly about your customer/client.

The “everyone challenge” is to embed factors that are relevant to people with disabilities, seniors, families with small children, etc. The current approach basically gives a neighbourhood credit for simply having a resource. If there is a recreation centre within a mile of a community, it would score points for that. For the other 20 – 40% of the population where this might not be enough it doesn’t take into consideration whether or not the building is accessible, whether or not there are inclusive programs and services and whether there are accessible paths from residential areas to accessible destinations (resources that meet the daily needs of citizens).

More work needs to be done to determine if the existing measures are the right ones or the measures are accurate for everyone while still being feasible to assess. The walkability scores you will find on the Internet leverage easy to access information from GIS (Geographic Information Systems) databases. This approach uses this data to develop proxy scores for walkability and ideally similar approaches can be found that can consider accessibility and inclusion.

More to come…

The two options for dealing with this have their strengths and weaknesses. The first option is to add more nodes to the network and represent a street with businesses along the sidewalk similar to that of workstations in a computer room using the bus network typology. Basically this would be like having a straight line (the sidewalk) with a node in front of every business and another node at the entrance of the business. This means that the sidewalk can can continue to be accessible (unless some barrier was encountered) even if businesses weren’t. They would be dead end branches along a main trunk. The junction would require properties such as 1500 mm X 1500 mm turning space on a level, firms surface free of barriers and hazards. The node for the business would depend on the standards for that type of business. With this approach, traditional measures of graph theory and social network analysis can be used but graphical representation can become rather messy.

The second approach is to simply connect the businesses to each other and identify two types of nodes – critical juncture nodes (nodes where two paths cross or a barrier exists like a curb cut or construction) and utility nodes (nodes that don’t impede physical access but may cause someone to change their behaviour due to cumulative effects of lack of access). In other words, if I’m going down the street and I encounter 4 or 5 inaccessible businesses in a row, nothing is physically stopping me from continuing (a critical junction node) but I may encounter a psychological barrier (utility node). The feedback I’m getting from this experience is – there’s nothing for me here so I should try somewhere else (dimunition of utility function), effectively resulting in a disconnected network.

The challenge with this is twofold. Firstly, traditional measures are not available for this type of data although Markov Chains may approximate its effects. Secondly, a utility function needs to be subjectively defined to determine at what point someone is going to give up on a particular path. This could be a heuristic such as, any time I have 3 consecutive businesses that are inaccessible, I will change direction or backtrack. Another possible rule of thumb is if there isn’t an accessible business for 50 m at a time, I will change direction. The rule has to be simple enough to visualize but complex enough to represent how a person navigates in their environment. Variables such as distance, frequency, type of node (relative to its environment), subjective utility based on the individual, rates of decay, etc. could all influence the utility function devised.

The benefit of this approach is that it is cleaner to represent on a network map. The dimunition of utility function may be necessary for both options because the same principle emerges regardless if the business is represented as being a node on the immediate path or a branch off a main path. The fact remains that if I’m rolling down the street and I encounter business after business that is not accessible, I am not enjoying a seamless, total experience and I’m likely to seek out a new destination (and subsequently spend my money elsewhere).

While this sounds like esoteric and theoretical, it may have great impact to any “connected experience” and application to other environments might prove useful.

A question is what are the “gateway recreation opportunities” for people with disabilities, seniors and other marginalized groups? Are they the same as the general population? I think this concept could have tremendous to how children with disabilities are taught in schools and the focus therapeutic recreation should have. The statistics also show a great dropoff in participation over someone’s lifespan (from 79% between the ages of 6 and 12 down to 34% by the time someone is 65). Considering demographics and the fact that people with disabilities already have much lower participation rates in outdoor activities, the opportunities to address this gap are incredible. Any solution, however, has to consider a strategic approach that considers environments such as:

• Formal and informal situations
• Schools
• Parks
• Recreation
• Rehabilitation
• Other???

If bicycling, fishing, hiking, camping, and running/jogging represent the gateway activities for the general population, where does that leave people with disabilities?

• No person should live more than 300m from their nearest area of natural greenspace of at least 2 ha in size
• There should be at least one accessible 20 ha site within 2 km from home
• There should be one accessible 100 ha site within 5 km
• There should be one accessible 500 ha site within 10 km

Comber, A., Brunsdon, C., & E. Green, (2008). Landscape and Urban Planning, 86, 103-114.

This article brings to light 2 issues: impacts on mobility and a different way of assessing mobility. Life space assessment (LSA) is a measure of where a person goes, the frequency of going there and the dependency in getting there. Although the authors cite that this method may be best used for older adults, it may serve as a measure for people with disabilities as well (many of whom are older). Modification of the Life Space Questionnaire (LSQ) developed by the University of Alabama at Birmingham (1999) may provide an interesting way to measure integration of people with disabilities within their communities.

After several days of assessments using the checklists in the Universal Parks and Trails toolkit, the following network map was produced. Levels of access are denoted by colour (clear  means not accessible, red is basic access, yellow is moderate access and green is universal access). The interesting thing about the park is the independent pathways – internal park trails and the seawall.