AODA Alliance
Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance Update
United for a Barrier-Free Ontario for All People with Disabilities
Website: www.aodaalliance.org
Email: aodafeedback@gmail.com
Twitter: @aodaalliance
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/aodaalliance
Excellent Online Global News Report on an AODA Alliance Video Showing Disability Barriers at the New Toronto Courthouse
August 20, 2024
SUMMARY
A great online Global News report today covered the billion-dollar accessibility bungle at the new downtown Toronto mega-courthouse. An AODA Alliance captioned video, released online earlier this month and reported on in this article, revealed the serious accessibility blunders in the new Armoury Street Courthouse.
Below you can read the Global News report. Catch the 14-minute version or the more detailed 49-minute version of the AODA Alliance’s “Billion-dollar Bungle” video.
The Ford Government has demonstrated that at the most basic level, it does not understand its legal obligations on accessibility for people with disabilities. The Global article states:
“A spokesperson for the provincial government said that the building ‘meets or exceeds current regulatory requirements’ for accessibility…”
Yet the building’s design contravenes the Government’s duty not to create new disability barriers in accessing services or facilities (like a courthouse), as required by the Ontario Human Rights Code and Section 15 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It would not be sufficient if the building complied with the weak and inadequate Ontario Building Code and the few built environment requirements set out in accessibility standards enacted under the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act.
But it gets worse! The Billion-dollar Accessibility Bungle video documents how this courthouse includes two clear and obvious violations of the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation enacted under the AODA.
Over the 12 days since we released this video, the Ford Government has not disputed the accuracy of any of the barriers documented in it. We are confident that the Government would have carefully reviewed this video. The media has contacted the Ford Government for its response to the video.
On the same day that this Global News report was published, the Human Space accessibility consulting firm held another meeting with the Government-appointed disability advisory group to get more feedback on disability barriers in this courthouse and how to fix them. AODA Alliance Chair David Lepofsky is a member of that group and attended that meeting. The AODA Alliance provided our Billion-dollar Accessibility Bungle video to Human Space and invited them to draw on the video as it prepares its report to the Ford Government on how to fix this mess.
How You Can Help
We again invite you to spread the word about the 14-minute version and the 49-minute version of our Billion-dollar Accessibility Bungle video. The two videos combined have already been viewed over 2,000 times.
Let us know what you do to spread the word about our new video. Email us at aodafeedback@gmail.com
There are only 134 days until 2025, the AODA’s deadline for the Ontario Government to have led Ontario to become accessible to 2.9 million Ontarians with disabilities. Do you think it’s past time that the Ford Government released an emergency action plan to address the “accessibility crisis” in this province that the Government-appointed Rich Donovan AODA Independent Review declared on June 6, 2023, 14 months ago?
MORE DETAILS
Global News August 20, 2024
Originally posted at https://globalnews.ca/news/10705151/ontario-toronto-downtown-court-house-accessibility-issues/
Advocates decry long list of problems with Ontario’s ‘most accessible courthouse’
By Isaac Callan Global News
Accessibility advocates are blasting the Ontario government for a string of design flaws at a new billion-dollar courthouse in downtown Toronto they say will make it harder for people with disabilities to access the justice system.
The Ontario Court of Justice location in Toronto opened in 2023 and cost just over $950 million to build, design and finance. It brought together six small courts, consolidating them under one roof.
The building boasts brail signage, wayfinding paths for people with vision loss and both remote and in-person options for court hearings across 73 different judicial spaces.
Announcing the courthouse, the Ontario government claimed it was “the most accessible courthouse in Ontario,” with Attorney General Doug Downey boasting his government was “supporting equal access to court services that are currently dispersed across multiple court locations.”
When chair of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance David Lepofsky went to the courthouse, however, he found claims didn’t quite stack up.
“They did include some accessibility features, but they screwed a lot up,” he told Global News.
Lepofsky has taken a particular interest in the court because he was involved in advising on the design process and said he warned the government repeatedly about problems.
“The day I first walked in there, what I was struck by is a good number of the problems that we’d previously warned about, came to fruition,” he said. “But there were new ones that I hadn’t even anticipated.”
The issues he encountered varied and were recorded in a video he posted online. Lepofsky, who is blind, found that wayfinding routes installed to help people who walk with a stick to navigate were hard to follow and occasionally stopped at random, while brail signs were either incomplete or wrong in some instances.
The ground floor step for the main staircase in the building had been designed with a large well underneath that could trip someone and the elevator volume was too low to be heard in all cases.
“This isn’t rocket science, this is basically doing their jobs,” Lepofsky said, pointing out mandatory building code standards fall short of what’s needed to make buildings universally accessible.
“Putting up the right sign on the right door is not a cost, it’s just part of the job. The other thing you need to know is that building accessibility in, if you do it from day one, makes it such that it costs nothing or it costs very little.”
A spokesperson for the provincial government said that the building “meets or exceeds current regulatory requirements” for accessibility and received a Rick Hansen Foundation Gold Accessibility Certification.
“We encourage feedback from stakeholders to provide input into areas where improvements can be made,” the spokesperson said, admitting that the accessibility committee involved in the building’s design had been “re-engaged” in recent months.
“We will continue to review feedback from stakeholders and the public on concern,” the spokesperson said.
The government did not respond to follow-up questions from Global News about some of the specific issues identified by Lepofsky when he toured the building.
Brad Envoy, the executive director of the Disability Justice Network of Ontario, said the fact the building had been certified despite having access issues meant nothing.
“They can say they have as many gold standards as they like, but I think the community knows fools’ gold when they see it,” he told Global News.
Envoy said the courthouse was a symptom of a wider problem — a government struggling to put people with disabilities at the centre of its justice system.
“I think that ultimately this is a really great visual and physical example that we see across the justice system, which is that disabled people, and in particular disabled racialized people, are being left behind and left out of conversations and spaces,” he said.
“The pieces around the courthouse are some of the simplest, most direct and obvious ways to engage in accessibility that this province can.”
Lepofsky said the mistakes inside the courthouse cannot be repeated, calling for a review and stricter standards to ensure accessible design is treated as mandatory for government buildings.
“It could be any mixture of incompetence, not caring. They might have heard the advice and not cared, or the wrong priorities… what that is prioritizing aesthetics over accessibility, which they did over and over and over,” he said.
“We need a fundamental, top-to-bottom revamp of how the government does its infrastructure building. Or this is just going to keep happening.