Radical Accessible Movements workshop brought a diverse conversation to the table
Photo of a sign for a wheelchair ramp. Flickr user Daniel Lobo (CC BY 2.0)
The 23rd Annual Labour Fair took place across George Brown College’s (GBC) campuses from March 23 to 27, with a variety of hosted programs, with various agendas to accomplish during the week.
One of the workshops focused on accessibility issues, which was organized under the Tools for Change Workshop banner—Radical Accessible Movements.
The focus of this workshop was to reflect on thoughts, ideas and actions on deep accessibility. The issues were discussed to open up diverse conversation and views from various intersectionality in our society.
These public events were organized in hopes of bringing the diverse opinions and beliefs together under one roof.
We are often unaware of the voices of people with visible disabilities who require basic infrastructure to access such events and the agenda of this workshop was to create awareness around how to make event spaces fully accessible for people with visible disabilities.
There was discussions on accommodation requirements for events open to the public and events open by invitation only. Further suggestions were made to consider the cost of accommodations as a normal part of budgeting, the way one would for food, room rentals or speaker fees.
There were discussions about the role of interpreters and American Sign Language service providers, and also about using assistive devices, which were suggested to make events more successful for all attendees.
Overall, the workshop provided much information for both the uninformed and students studying disability discourses, which helped to make sense of the requirements for those with a visible disability.
It is up to us to take a more thorough look around us and understand the existence of the invisible disability, which remains profoundly ignored in our society. In short, we are still biased towards a particular section of society and ignoring their unheard voices.
