Thank you very much.
That is a great question. I have been working in this industry for over 21 years. I do all different types of projects, but my passion projects are accessible playgrounds and housing.
Unfortunately, we see a lot of really avoidable mistakes with the funding formulas being too complex. I mentioned, in my witness statement, that the way we teach design education is as much a part of the problem we're experiencing as not knowing what to do. We think about accessibility as something that is “othering” and say, “Disabled people need that, not me.” If you think about how different you were 20 years ago and how different you're likely going to be in 20 years, then the concepts of who you are designing for and “everybody changes" are fundamentally important.
Some of the mistakes we see in the current design strategies and funding models are.... Operationally, if you require only certain units, or a percentage of units, to be accessible, most of those accessibility requirements are for wheelchair users, and that's only a small percentage of the different types of disabilities we have. Further, what requirements they do include for wheelchair users don't actually create usable spaces.
Some of the mistakes we see, for example.... If it says “an accessible path of travel must be provided to the front door and then from the front door to the washroom” or “to a bedroom” or “to the kitchen”, the design industry doesn't know that a path of travel needs to include a turning space for an assistive piece of equipment. In the building code, the size and space of the turn circle is not evidence-based sizing. It's a negotiated settlement.
Designable Environments worked with, I think, the National Research Council several years ago on a study about what was missing from the national building code. This, again, goes to some of the mistakes we're making: We fundamentally design for non-disabled people without thinking that 100% of us will have disabilities at some point.
We found, in that study, that there were—