In the fourth review of the AODA, Rich Donovan states that Ontario will not be fully accessible by 2025. In other words, the provincial government will not meet its own deadline under the AODA. Limited creation, implementation, and enforcement of AODA standards impacts the well-being and safety of Ontarians with disabilities. Therefore, Donovan recommends that the Ontario government should declare this lack of progress on accessibility a crisis. This crisis state should last six (6) months. During this time, the Ontario government should form a crisis committee to implement crucial accessibility improvements in the province. The Premier should act as the chair of this committee, and the Secretary of Cabinet should act as co-chair. Furthermore, Donovan outlines tactical recommendations the province should follow to fulfill its remaining responsibilities in the public sector. One of these tactical recommendations is creation of a public dashboard of information about disability.
Public Dashboard of Information about Disability
According to the review, the AODA’s slow implementation is partly due to lack of publicly available information about disability. In other words, the government knows little about the lives or needs of people with disabilities. As a result, it does not understand the profound impact that inaccessibility has on people throughout the province. Likewise, the government does not understand how enacting and updating AODA standards would improve people’s lives.
In addition, the review notes that campaigns or activities to raise non-disabled people’s awareness about disabilities often have limited success. This lack may happen because the information these campaigns are based on is also limited. Details about how many people with disabilities there are in Ontario could benefit both AODA implementation and public awareness. For example, publicly available information could include the number of people who have experienced accessibility barriers in:
- Buildings and public spaces
- Conventional and specialized transportation
- Information or communication
- Technology
- K-12 or postsecondary education
- Healthcare
- Housing
Recommendations
Therefore, the review recommends that the research team gathering data on disability should include a data and visualization analyst. This analyst should be responsible for creating a public dashboard of information on disability. The dashboard should contain all the quantitative data the team has collected, organized in a way that is easy to understand. Furthermore, the dashboard should also include links that readers can follow to access qualitative data. The research team should update the dashboard frequently.
This dashboard should be comparable to one developed in New Zealand. Moreover, Ontario’s dashboard should be similar to the one the government created and used during the COVID-19 pandemic, to share important, up-to-date, and accurate information with the public. In other words, the government and the citizens of Ontario have experience sharing and relying on information in this format. As a result, a public dashboard of information about disability could give many more people in the province a better understanding of disability and its impacts.