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
Happy 31st Birthday to Ontario’s Tenacious Grassroots Movement Advocating for Accessibility for All People with Disabilities!
November 29, 2025
SUMMARY
Today is the 31st anniversary of the birth of the organized grassroots movement that has campaigned nonstop for the enactment and effective implementation of the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act. We have made gains that give us pride. We’ve fought an uphill battle, which in some ways is just as uphill today.
Thirty-one years ago today, on November 29, 1994, this grassroots movement was spontaneously born in a Queen’s Park meeting room to fight for legislation to make Ontario barrier-free for people with disabilities. A group of some twenty people with disabilities spontaneously gathered in a meeting room at Queen’s Park with the feeling that they had to do something. The “something” that they did was to create a new and enduring grassroots non-partisan movement to campaign for strong accessibility legislation in Ontario.
How You Can Help
- Celebrate our 31st birthday. Create an accessible barrier-free and hopefully calorie-free birthday cake!
- Check out our new podcast: Disability rights and wrongs — The David Lepodcast. Wherever you get your podcasts. Be ready this week for our fifth episode with quite a surprise guest! You will never guess it!
For more background
- Read about the events that led up to the birth of Ontario’s enduring disability accessibility movement.
- Watch a captioned one-hour video of the celebration we held on November 28, 2014, the 20th anniversary of the birth of the AODA movement
- Look through a comprehensive timeline of major events over the past 30 years in the grassroots campaign for accessibility in Ontario.
- The AODA Alliance’s November 25, 2024 news release after its press conference and community public hearings wrapped up.
- The AODA Alliance’s captioned online video series of the major news conferences and other key events in the 30-year campaign for accessibility for people with disabilities.
- For all the background on the work of the Ontarians with Disabilities Act Committee from 1994 to its dissolution in August 2005, visit odacommittee.net
- For all the work of its successor coalition, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act Alliance, from Fall 2005 to the present, visit aodaalliance.org