British Columbia is known for its abundant outdoor recreational spaces; however, those spaces are not accessible for everyone, especially those with physical disabilities.
A University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) School of Planning or Sustainability associate professor Dr. Marx Groulx wants to change that.
Groulx and is now working with Spinal Cord Injury BC and a network of community and academic partners to identify barriers to access and develop plans to remove them.
The research team received a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Partnership Development Grant worth $177,838 for this project .
“One of the lessons we’ve learned during the COVID-19 pandemic is how important it is to have accessible outdoor spaces available to everyone,” Groulx said.
“Right now persons with an impairment don’t share equal access to these spaces. Our research will explore ways to address this gap.”
It’s called ‘Nature for all: A barrier free Canada through standards-based practice’ project and includes academic researchers, accessibility advocates, agencies in the tourism and parks sectors and government organizations.
“Barriers can be physical but they can also be attitudes that are framed around ablest understandings of society that assume there is a normal or average individual that we can plan around,” Groulx explains.
“What is needed is a shift toward an attitude that recognizes we happen to have a distribution in society of people who engage in all kinds of different motilities and sensory experiences. We need to plan for that distribution.”
The federal Accessible Canada Act came into force on July 11, 2019. This spring the B.C. provincial government introduced the Accessible British Columbia Act and it received royal assent on June 17.
With new laws come new standards so Groulx, Spinal Cord Injury BC, and the research team are looking for ways to make it easier for outdoor tourism and recreation stakeholders to identify the changes they need to make to comply with the regulations and make their sites more accessible for all.
““British Columbia is renowned for being ‘super, natural’, but the reality is that far too many of our province’s super, natural experiences are not accessible to people with disabilities,” said Chris McBride, executive director of Spiral Chord BC.
“Although the work to make outdoor recreation spaces more accessible to all can seem daunting, there are many inexpensive, easily achieved improvements that can be made now, with larger-scale removal of accessibility barriers made through strategic planning and implementation over time.”
The research will look at ways to synthesize these new standards into a standalone smartphone application and database housing accessibility data for outdoor spaces. Operators of outdoor spaces, community groups or volunteers could use the app and database to identify what they need to measure and interpret the results.
Dr. Waqar Haque from UNBC Business Intelligence Research Group, Dr. Piper Jackson from Thompson Rivers University and co-founder of the Centre for Technology Adoption for Aging in the North at UNBC Dr. Shannon Freeman will participate in the research.
“The platform will be used both for reporting of how accessible a site is as well as helping to set priorities for what needs to be changed,” Groulx said.
“We won’t know where to invest resources for making upgrades to our outdoor spaces until we have measured to identify the gaps that exist.”
The research will build on work started by Spinal Cord Injury BC who have already curated more than 200 standards for outdoor tourism and recreation sites ranging from the availability of seating to the slope of trails and have worked with partners in the tourism and recreation sector to apply these standards across all regions of B.C
The project will include collaborations with community partners and tourism organizations, researchers at multiple universities, and undergraduate and graduate students.
