AODA Alliance
ACCESSIBILITY FOR ONTARIANS WITH DISABILITIES ACT ALLIANCE
NEWS RELEASE – FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Disability Advocates’ Powerful New Video Reveals Serious Accessibility Problems at new Downtown Toronto Mega-Courthouse – A Billion-Dollar Accessibility Bungle Shows Ontario Falling Further Behind Schedule for Becoming Disability Accessible by 2025
August 8, 2024 Toronto: The AODA Alliance today makes public a striking new 14-minute video (and a more detailed 50-minute version) exposing significant disability accessibility barriers in a new public billion-dollar government building in the heart of downtown Toronto, built with public money. This video documents serious accessibility problems at the new Toronto Armoury Street Courthouse. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky, himself totally blind, guides you on a tour of barriers that hurt people with blindness, low vision, hearing disabilities, mobility disabilities, autism, dyslexia, chronic fatigue or pain, and others.
Short version (14-minute video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6XNVMoUmB8
Long Version (49-minute video): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zvo9jYIUvSc
For example, there’s far too little disability parking for court attendees with disabilities. Provisions for people with disabilities waiting for WheelTrans are seriously inadequate. It’s far too difficult for blind people to even find the building’s front door or to navigate in parts of the building. The main floor help desk and third floor Court Services Office both include violations of Ontario’s accessibility laws. Braille washroom signage is full of inaccuracies, such as labelling some washrooms as “universal” when they aren’t accessible.
These videos reveal preventable disability barriers that the Ontario Government created with public money. Creating these new disability barriers is an affront to the rights of people with disabilities under the Charter of Rights and the Ontario Human Rights code. The AODA Alliance and others forewarned the Government about many of these barriers before any shovels went into the ground.
The Ontario Government said they wanted this courthouse to be disability accessible. It includes some good accessibility features, but these are dramatically overshadowed by the blunders. Months after this building opened, the Ford Government hired two different accessibility consulting firms to advise it on how to fix the problems. The public is left to wonder why the Government, promising to be responsible with the use of public money, didn’t listen to the good accessibility advice it received from accessibility consultants and the disability community before construction had begun.
“Most people mistakenly think that the Ontario Building Code requires all new buildings in Ontario to be accessible to people with disabilities. Our new video shows the painful truth that this isn’t so. With this new courthouse as a stark example, we once again call on the Ford Government to now substantially strengthen and effectively enforce Ontario’s laws on building accessibility, including the Ontario Building Code and the Disabilities Act’s accessibility standards,” said David Lepofsky, chair of the AODA Alliance, which spearheads the non-partisan campaign for disability accessibility in Ontario. “This video also shows how some design professionals (like some architects) can be dramatically out of touch with the needs of 2.9 million Ontarians with disabilities.”
“We tell architecture students that they won’t want to ever design a building that ends up in one of our videos,” said Lepofsky. “This most recent debacle shows what happens when Ontario has weak and ineffectively enforced built environment accessibility regulations, when design professionals have inadequate accessibility training or give accessibility too little priority, when the Government ignores its grand promises on accessibility, and when there are insufficient accessibility safeguards tied to Ontario’s massive infrastructure spending.”
This billion-dollar accessibility bungle shows how far Ontario still must go to live up to the promise of the landmark 2005 Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act, for which people with disabilities fought so hard from 1994 to 2005 and which requires the Ontario Government to lead this province to become accessible to people with disabilities by 2025. Over the past decade, three successive Government-appointed Independent Reviews called on the Ontario Government to treat barriers in the built environment as a priority. The most recent report told the Ford Government 14 months ago that Ontario is in an accessibility crisis. The Government has failed to take the needed action to fix this. All Ontarians suffer as a result.
This new video follows in the highly successful cyber-footsteps of the success of three earlier AODA Alliance videos. Those earlier videos revealed troubling accessibility problems at the Toronto Metropolitan University’s Student Learning Centre, several new or renovated Toronto area public transit stations and Centennial College’s new Culinary Arts Centre. Those earlier videos have each been viewed thousands of times.
These videos, which all (including the media) are encouraged to broadcast or link to, have captioning for persons with hearing loss available.
Contact: David Lepofsky, aodafeedback@gmail.com Twitter: @aodaalliance
More on the AODA Alliance’s campaign for accessibility in the built environment is available on the AODA Alliance website’s built environment page.