Season 02 | Episode 09: Accessibility Advisory Committees

David: Hello, and welcome to Practical Accessibility Insights. I’m David Best, and with me is my trusty co-host, Sandi Gauder. Hi, Sandi.

Sandi: Hi, David. How are you today?

David: I’m doing good, and the weather’s great, so I’m feeling very good with the spring starting to kick in high gear here.

Sandi: Yes, finally.

David: Yeah, so today you have a guest for our listeners that works with the Kawartha Lakes Accessibility Advisory Committee.

So why don’t you go ahead and introduce our guest?

Sandi: So today we are being joined by Christine Briggs. She is the People Partner of Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility for the City of Kawartha Lakes, my hometown. So I’m looking forward to having a chat with her. Welcome, Christine. How are you today?

Christine: I’m well. Hi, Sandi and David. Thanks so much for having me.

Sandi: Thanks for joining us. Before we get into some questions, why don’t you tell us and our listeners a little bit more about you and your role within the city?

Christine: So I’ve been with the city for seven years. As you mentioned, I’m the Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility Partner, and that is a mouthful.

So quite often, I’m just referred to as the IDEA partner. And what that really means is that I work with departments across the city to ensure that our corporate policies and our programs align with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, or the AODA, and also the Ontario Human Rights Code.

Sandi: How easy is that to do? You touch so many different parts of a community, so I would imagine that some departments might be more open to this idea and some might be a little bit less so. Is that true? Or how would you describe it?

Christine: That’s such a great question. Some departments are more familiar, and some are learning, and some departments have content that’s really difficult to make accessible.

So certainly one thing that we’ve done is we’ve put in place some really fantastic internal guiding document and safeguards to make sure that those standards are followed. For example, in the realm of content creation, we provide training for all of our content contributors on the AODA standards before it makes its way to either our communications team or our clerks team for publishing on the website.

Sandi: Accessibility sounds like a simple concept, but actually executing and executing well can be really challenging. Out of curiosity, what web content accessibility guidelines are you aiming for within the municipality?

Christine: Yeah, I’m so glad you asked. So we’ve put together an internal style guide or a guiding document, and it’s called our Information and Communications Accessibility Design Standards.

We love an acronym at the city, and so we refer to it as our ICADS document. And we really launched this to make our expectations clear, for staff and contractors alike. So if you’ve ever gone through the Information and Communication Standards, you know that you need to actually make your way to another document to get the full breakdown of standards, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines.

So it can be really tricky trying to figure out what standard you need to adhere to. So what we did in our ICADs document is we took best practice from across those standards and with working with our disability community to make sure that they were all in one place. So if you Google City of Kawartha Lakes ICADs, you can see some advice on plain language, or how to format your document, um, with accessible structure in Word or Excel or PDF.

And so it’s a really great starting point for people.

Sandi: That’s a lot of work to put all that together. Certainly when you start simplifying things or consolidating the information in one place, that’s certainly helpful for people to have something to reference.

So you mentioned talking with the disability community in the city. How do you actually go about engaging with that community?

Christine: A couple of ways in my day-to-day. So as David mentioned, I’m the staff liaison to the Kawartha Lakes Accessibility Advisory Committee, which is primarily composed of individuals with disabilities. The other way is through direct engagement with our community members, whether that’s through individual service requests Or responding to questions.

And also with our staff. In 2022, a Canadian survey on disability was done, and it found that approximately one in four people ages 15 and older are dealing with a disability in their day-to-day life, and that includes our staff. And Sandi, this is so timely because we refresh our committee every two years, and we are coming up to the end of a term.

So we will be refreshing our committee this fall following the municipal election. And so we would love to hear from new volunteers, and so if you keep an eye out on the city website, they advertise for volunteer vacancies. That’s where you’ll find spaces for the Accessibility Advisory Committee.

Sandi: So other than maybe having a, a disability and lived experience, what else are you looking for in those volunteers?

Christine: The majority of our volunteers are individuals with disabilities. However, we also have individuals who may be the guardians or caregivers of children with disabilities, and so having navigated the system, they can offer some really valuable insight as well. So we’re open to a number of different individuals, whether you have a disability or you don’t.

If you’re willing to come and provide feedback and learn, we’d love to have you.

Sandi: So what actually happens on the Accessibility Advisory Committee? How do they actually function and fit into the city as a whole and its processes?

Christine: Yeah. So the Accessibility Advisory Committee, it’s advisory in nature. That advice comes in a few different channels.

So the first one would be on accessibility planning. So for example, when we gear up to do an accessibility master plan, which is our own small strategic plan in a way for accessibility, they’re consulted and they provide feedback on that plan. They also review any site plans, so any new buildings or renovations or public spaces, they offer recommendations to improve accessibility on the built environment.

And then they also advise directly on policies and programs. So I had referenced our ICADS document at the beginning of our conversation, and the committee was instrumental in reviewing that document to make sure that we were meeting standards or maybe flagging gaps. Great example of this is within the Information and Communication Standard.

There’s no legal requirement, for example, that you need to use a sans serif font. But if you look in our ICADS document or in the city’s branding standards, that’s something that we’ve really advocated for based on these conversations, because we’ve found that serif font really interferes with individuals who have dyslexia.

It changes the spacing in between letters, and it can make it more difficult to read that text. And so based on those conversations and based on research that came from those conversations, we’ve actually amended that in our brand standards and within our ICADS document.

Sandi: So do they ever get involved with external accessibility organizations?

How do you mesh with those types of organizations?

Christine: So they do accessibility awareness, and one of the ways that we’ve done that is by partnering with our economic development team who has the Million Dollar Makeover program for businesses in the area. Businesses looking to make accessibility upgrades can qualify for a certain grant amount as part of that program, and the Accessibility Advisory Committee is happy to go out and chat with chambers or the BIAs to advocate and raise awareness.

Another point of awareness that the committee really focuses their efforts on are accessibility awards. So going out into the community, raising awareness about accessibility, whether that is within our community groups or within local businesses, and garnering nominations for the Kawartha Lakes Accessibility Awards.

Sandi: I’m sure most communities actually have an element of their downtown that’s quite old. For those building owners, how do they approach access into their stores for people who might be in a mobility device or may struggle to climb stairs?

Christine: It’s really tough, especially when you’re working within old buildings.

And so the legislation’s quite interesting, ’cause as it reads right now, you don’t need to bring your building up to modern accessibility standards unless you’re doing a renovation or you are embarking on new construction. So quite a lot of our older downtown buildings are not accessible. So again, one way that we try to encourage that or incentivize that is through the Million Dollar Makeover program.

We’ve seen a lot of creative solutions that are perhaps less permanent in nature. So one of my favorite accessibility award winners was from a couple of years ago, and they were a blueberry farm. And we had a resident who couldn’t traverse the gravel pathway to get to the blueberries. And so even by some creative thinking and, and opening up a different access point so that everybody could participate, it’s finding these small creative solutions that have gone such a long way, I think, in the community.

Sandi: So then the municipality, does it play any role in enforcing these accessibility standards, or is that something that you really don’t have a role to play?

Christine: So we enforce them within our own corporation, so within our buildings, within our teams. But in terms of broader compliance, I often get calls from community members if they can’t access a building.

If it’s not municipally owned, if it’s privately owned, that’s something that they would need to go to the Ministry for.

Sandi: Have you had any conversations with vendors who see your design systems as part of the RFP and go, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” or, “I don’t understand,” or just don’t know what to do with it once you put that into an RFP?

Christine: Yeah, so we do, and as I said, if they sign the procurement agreement, it, it’s embedded right in there as well. So I have had a few conversations. I think traditionally there’s not a lot of case law on enforcement, especially with smaller municipalities where you don’t have a dedicated accessibility officer.

Sometimes they don’t realize when contractors bring forth inaccessible documents. So it’s, it was really important for us to put our expectations in one consolidated, easily accessible document. What I’ve found is that through our training, staff are really building their confidence, which means that even if they’re working with a consultant to deliver a report, they’re much more confident in checking that report and making sure that it meets those standards before accepting it fully.

So that’s a big part of it, is even if our staff aren’t directly involved in, in the report generation, is really feeling confident to run those accessibility checks and make sure that they meet our standards. And so that’s something that we’ve really been working on with staff training.

Sandi: So then everything doesn’t land on your plate by the sounds of it.

Christine: It’s, it’s very much a team effort and I, I’m so grateful. I’ve got a wonderful team at the city. And as I mentioned, we do have a number of different checkpoints where I don’t get all of the reports going to council, or I don’t get all of the information or content created for the website.

Generally, that goes through internal checks within their divisions, and then check with our communications team if it’s going on the website, or a check with our clerks team before it hits our agenda. And then maybe for some more complex ones, they’ll come to me.

Sandi: When we first started in this field of digital accessibility, we worked with smaller municipalities, and their biggest bugaboo was PDFs.

Like many large organizations, municipalities love PDFs, and they’re notoriously difficult to make accessible. And we used to try to encourage these clients to, wherever possible, use HTML instead of PDF if, especially if it’s going up on the website. So how do you make that decision? Like, how do you decide when something should be an accessible PDF and when something should be HTML?

Christine: So that is a very good question. I’ll do my best to answer that. A number of our documents that go up onto the website are attachments. They’re reports, or they are information guides. And so we made the decision to go with PDF, uh, simply to reduce barriers. And what I mean by that is from a socioeconomic standpoint, you can open a PDF on a cellphone if that’s what you have, or an iPad, or on your computer.

And largely, the content remains intact or the same across those modalities. So we can have pictures and we can have text. When we have to get into specific software to open up any of our attachments, that’s when it gets tricky because it means that the customer or the resident has to go out and procure that specialized platform.

And so quite a lot of our content, if it’s a link to a document or something that you can download, you will find it’s in PDF, especially when we have forms. Say, for instance, for housing, we wanna have fillable PDFs available to those who need them. Yeah, PDFs are tricky because it’s a love-hate relationship when staff begin working with them, and they run the checks, and they see all the different pieces that need remediating.

But I actually love them because it gives you greater control over each individual content piece on that document.

David: You have a very challenging job, Christine, and I know that from my experiences in working with other municipalities on various projects. One of the biggest challenges I find that most municipalities have is the issue of accountability.

It’s one thing to have guidelines and procedures, but it’s another thing to put them in practice, actually have action strategies to do something. So I’m sure that you’re caught in the middle of a lot of these expectations that people have. Do you have an accountability process within your programs?

Christine: Yeah, we do. That’s a great point, David. So we have our accessible customer service feedback form, which you can pick up at any service center, or you can download on our accessibility page on our website. And we do have a process where that might come to me, and I work then with the corresponding department or division to get a response back to you.

We are working very hard with our customer service team as well to be able to provide first point of contact resolution. So when you call into customer service with an issue regarding accessibility, they can take down your information, make notes about your concern, and point you into the right direction right off the hop so that you don’t have to wait to get ahold of me, which has been fantastic.

Now, in terms of broader accountability, something I talk a lot about are these compliance reports or the potential to be audited. And It can be quite stressful if you get a knock on the door from the province letting you know that you’re getting a full desk audit, especially when some of that content wasn’t produced in-house.

If you’ve used a consultant to meet the deadlines to turn around a fully accessible document, it can be very stressful. And so I try to lead with the idea of building with accessibility in mind. Let’s build with it at the forefront instead of trying to remediate it on the back end, because that’s just stressful for everybody.

So if we build with accessibility in mind right from the beginning, one, it makes us accountable to our expectations under the legislation, but two, it benefits everybody.

David: So do you have local users that do testing on website pages and content, or is it all done by a contract auditor?

Christine: So we do a lot of testing in-house through our communications team.

We also have the ability to scan our website for compliance, and so we can generate a lot of reports and flag documents that are inaccessible internally.

Sandi: Does your advisory committee get involved with any testing?

Christine: When we launched our new website earlier this year, they came and ran through the site with our communications team.

We opened it up to the community broadly to come in and test it out, so they were involved in that capacity. And certainly, we invite all of our divisions to come and speak to the committee, especially if there is an accessibility component.

David: Does your committee actually have, like, an annual conference call with the local community or something to create a dialogue?

Christine: So we meet at least quarterly with the committee as a whole. And during committee meetings, anybody can come in and make a deputation. So we post our agenda online a minimum of three days before each meeting, and anybody looking to make a deputation to the committee can reach out to me, and we’ll get them on the agenda.

David: Do you also involve the advisory committee with major infrastructure projects? In other words, do they get a chance to sit on council meetings and actually understand and get reports about projects that are gonna take place?

Christine: In a way, I suppose. So council meetings are open for everybody. When we are looking at taking on a new project, so for example, this isn’t infrastructure-related, but it’s on my mind because we’ve been doing a lot of work with transit.

We’ll have the transit team come to the committee and walk them through what they’re working on or, or potentially any proposals, and at that point, the committee has an opportunity to voice their suggestions.

Sandi: So City of Kawartha Lakes is a geographically large municipality. It probably takes an hour to drive from one end to the other, with lots of smaller communities the further you get away from Lindsay, which is kind of the, the hub.

Is it more challenging for people who may have a disability to deal with the municipality if they’re on the edges of the city? Or does that make no difference whatsoever?

Christine: Well, now with electronic participation, and that’s something that we’ve implemented for our committee instead of, you know, making our volunteers commute into City Hall every time we have a meeting, we’ve found that it makes our meetings more accessible if we do have this electronic component.

So beyond the travel time, and the need to have a vehicle and all of the costs associated with it, we also can include more accessibility features during electronic participation, so including closed captioning, and that’s really been a hit with the committee as well.

David: I know that for most municipalities, it’s a challenge to coordinate everything and, and accountability is hard when there’s a lot of issues on the budget, and everybody wants their project on the budget.

Some municipalities tend to put accessibility way down the list, and unfortunately, a lot of complaints just never get to city council, really. They get lost in the process somewhere. It sounds like that you have more control over the infrastructure processes so that recommendations the advisory committee has does get through.

Christine: Well, it’s interesting too, David, because as I mentioned, not only do we try to meet the standards in the AODA, we do try to exceed them, and that’s especially true in our accessibility design standards. And sometimes we have projects come through that meet the building code, but perhaps fall short on some of our extra requirements.

Anytime there’s a deviation on that, it has to go to the accessibility advisory committee, and they provide feedback on the best way to deal with that. So we really have tried to be intentional about not only meeting the standards, but thinking about really how we can meet our duty to accommodate in a real way.

David: The challenge comes when there’s a conflict between city bylaws and accessibility laws. So if you have a store downtown that wants to put a ramp at their door, but the bylaw says you can’t do that because it blocks the sidewalk, it becomes an issue. How do you deal with bylaw and accessibility laws that conflict?

Christine: Yeah. So we, as I mentioned, I have a great team here at the city, and a big part of that is collaboration. And so generally when we work with our bylaw officers, if we explain sort of the intention behind what we’re doing, more often than not, we can find a compromise, so that everybody wins.

And so to your point, it might be difficult to have a permanent ramp there blocking the entrance, but if we have something that we can bring in and out as needed to assist in ensuring people can enter the store or the business, we’ve generally been able to find temporary solutions.

David: I can appreciate some of the challenges you must confront.

Sandi: Yeah. You’re kind of stuck between a rock and a hard place, especially with things like ramps. We live in an environment that gets snow, which adds another layer of challenge in the winter because we rely on the municipality to clear the sidewalks so that we can navigate.

But if you’ve got a ramp, then it gets in the way of the snowplow, but somebody who uses mobility device needs the streets to be cleared so they can get to the ramp to get into the building. Some of these problems seem to be unsolvable. I guess that’s where you come in, is you and the advisory committee guide people as to, you know, the best way to approach things or possible ways.

Christine: Yeah. And certainly every day is a learning opportunity. Yeah, we do the best we can, and I think that’s where conversations like these are so important. Just opening up the dialogue, making sure people know who to reach out to if they have a question or a concern, and really making this part of an ongoing conversation.

David: Yeah, you’re absolutely right. The open dialogue, transparency is so important. Do you keep records of users providing feedback and the kind of responses that come out of that?

Christine: We do, yeah. So we do have a case management system, and so if you write in or you submit a case based on accessibility, we’re able to keep track of the concern, when it came in, and ultimately how it was remediated, which helps us get back, to your point, David, from earlier in our conversation, helps us get back to the resident in a reasonable timeframe and let them know how the case was handled.

Sandi: Do you have a favorite success story or something that may have been a barrier, a digital barrier, or a built environment barrier that as a municipality you were able to resolve?

Christine: I would say there’s two. So one has to do with a resource that we created, and the other has to do with an awareness piece.

And so the first one really is the ICADs document, because it was such a barrier, especially for new staff or contractors who didn’t have a background in accessibility, to get to the legislation, to weed their way through what we needed to do as a public sector organization, and then to implement those standards.

And so by coming together with our communications team, with our accessibility advisory committee, we were really able to simplify that process and put some best practice together in one easy-to-find spot, and that has been a game changer.

Now, from an awareness piece, this has more to do with an identified gap. At the Accessibility Awards, we honor individuals and businesses and community groups and employees who are going above and beyond to enhance accessibility in the community. But we have some incredible youth who are doing big things in their schools, within their friend groups, and we really wanted to shine a light on some of the contributions of those individuals.

And so this year will actually be our inaugural Catherine Peters Youth Accessibility Award, where we went out to community groups, school boards, parent councils, and asked them to send us nominations for youth doing big things to improve accessibility in their communities. And so I’m very excited for our June 2nd Committee of the Whole meeting, where we will be honoring these individuals for the first time at the Accessibility Awards.

Sandi: With this new youth award, have you noticed a difference between how young people approach accessibility versus the older generation? Do they have a different outlook on how to approach accessibility?

Christine: Yeah, that’s really interesting. And reflecting on it, I would say that maybe one trend that I’ve noticed is that we tend to fixate more on physical accessibility.

But that’s not necessarily the case with our youth. It’s more diverse in terms of inclusion.

David: Christine, I wanna thank you so much for joining us on our podcast and sharing with our listeners all of the great work that you’re doing with your community. And I really appreciate and thank you for your personal efforts in helping to make the municipality more inclusive.

I know that there can be some real challenges there. And we need to let people know that many of our municipalities do have programs and are really working hard to, to create an inclusive environment. Do you have any contact information or website URLs you would like to leave with our listeners?

Christine: Yes. So you can reach me at accessibility@kawarthalakes.ca.

If you have an accessibility concern, you can enter a case on our website. Or you can find us at the accessibility page, which is again featured on the City of Kawartha Lakes website.

Sandi: So thank you for that. We have a tradition of ending our podcast with the same question for all our guests, and that is one tip that you can leave our listeners that will help them with their digital accessibility journey, something practical that they can do tomorrow when they get on with their day.

Christine: So I suppose my tip would be start as you mean to go forward. So from the very beginning, focus on the structure of your document. It’s much easier to build with accessibility in mind than to go back and remediate at the end. So start as you mean to go forward.

Sandi: I love that. Yes, it is so true. There’s nothing like trying to get those chocolate chips into the cookie after it’s been baked. So yes, very good advice.

Well, thank you so much, Christine, for taking some time to chat with us today, and look forward to hearing about this new youth winner that’s coming up in June. So thanks for teasing that for us. I hope you have a great day.

Christine: Thank you so much. Take care.

David: The views, thoughts and opinions expressed on this podcast.

Are the speakers own and do not necessarily represent those of the podcast team and partners. This podcast is for information and learning purposes only. The Practical Accessibility Insights podcast is hosted by CMS Web Solutions. The intent of this podcast is to raise awareness for practical advice and strategies for making digital and physical environments more accessible to everyone.

Thank you for joining us in this time of discovery and sharing for a more inclusive society. If you have questions or comments, you can email us at info, I N F O, at david dot best or Sandi, S A N D I, at CMS Web Solutions dot com. For more information and resources, go to www.CMSWebSolutions.com or www.BestAccessibility.consulting.