Editor’s Note: Access Awareness Week is a yearly celebration to highlight the importance of accessibility and the many ways that it impacts our lives. Each day of this week we will feature an article looking at accessibility in its many forms.

Becoming an accessible and inclusive institution means being flexible in the way we think about people, things and our environment.

For example, even 10 years ago our understanding of the Human Rights Code protections was different from what it is today, largely because the application of human rights continuously changes.

The Human Rights Code works to prohibit discrimination on the basis of protected grounds, but these code protections are not written in stone. A sign of this was the recent addition of gender identity and gender expression to the protected grounds in Ontario. Incorporating gender experience and gender identity means that the spectrum of interpretation grows to allow for equal participation in a positive light.

Having access to people, places and things is a fundamental requirement for the equal distribution of rights in Ontario and we are now starting to see how a person’s various identities intersect with one another as variables that can alter how a person might interpret the world around them. As an example, creed, gender and disability can all work to shift how a person feels they are best accommodated in places like school, work or in the community. This concept of intersecting Identities serves to set-up a discussion about how accessibility is an ongoing process, and, as Brock University is committed to becoming accessible for everybody, it sets its sights firmly on how it can best provide accessibility in the future.

Down the road, the more that discussions of disability issues focus on mechanisms aimed at equality as an end game, the discussion might include further considerations that cover multiple code grounds.

Brock is creating an accessible community as a process, and that means breaking apart long held and well-worn models that have been used to explain the identities of everybody, not only people with disabilities.

• This article was written by Chris Lytle and Alana Sharpe