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.
At Brock University it’s understood the more discussions we can have about the interrelationships of rights, the more the application of accessibility and inclusion will become part of our unique culture as an institution.
Throughout this week we have been highlighting different attributes of accessibility and briefly linking them to human rights, but we would like to answer the question, what is the long-term effect of this on us as part of the Brock Community?
To begin, Brock sets a high standard for the application of accessibility. This is due in part to the legal landscape of the province, but it is also largely due to the ambition of the University to become a leader. The foundation of becoming a leader in the area of accessibility is providing open and respectful lines of communication, and this comes to us in the form of consultation and feedback processes.
Consultation and feedback processes are important because this is how we can develop our own evidence about what policies and activities should look like. When maintained correctly, these become an invaluable tool that can assist in developing better and more resounding approaches to inclusion.
From an accessibility standpoint, consultation and feedback processes are important because they provide for implementation of accommodations and analysis of accessibility. From a standpoint of human rights, they’re also important because the general information held within requests for accommodation can assist an organization in planning barrier free access by employing universal design.
In terms of forward movement it’s great to see that mechanisms which allow for community involvement are being recognized as vital. The Ontario Human Rights Commission creates policy for new and developing trends which are designed to tweak the ear of organizations, allowing them to make an interpretation that will allow for a broadening concept of inclusion. The reason why the Ontario Human Rights Commission is able to do this is because they have a preternatural ability to collect intelligence on rights that can work to an organization’s favour.
Incorporating these two facets of accountability into our own infrastructure manoeuvres us towards the same sort of innovation. At the Marco level, consultation and feedback processes are two key ingredients to be used when developing a rights-based approach to the operations of an organization wanting to become even more accountable to its constituents.
What we have seen in Ontario is the re-negotiation of what decision making looks like and the possibilities of pushing this even further, allowing us to re-imagine what the potential operations of an organization might look like 10 years down the road when the role of the AODA is eclipsed by sheer home grown innovation.
• This article was written by Chris Lytle and Alana Sharpe
