Disability Culture & Accessibility

OCAD U’s vision is that everyone in the community can participate in all our learning and teaching experiences, facilities and spaces, events and professional opportunities. 

• We commit to including students, staff and instructors with disabilities as a matter of human rights and as essential to our organizational culture. We aim to structure and design for inclusiveness, rather than assuming that accessibility is just a matter of special modifications that leave our underlying patterns, spaces, systems and culture unchanged.
• We recognize that inclusive classrooms and studios support deeper learning, greater learner engagement, richer research, and more powerful artistic expression. We adopt principles of inclusive design to enable solutions that suit individual needs/preferences by making flexible, adaptable facilities, resources and tools available to the whole community.
• We believe that inclusion is a process and an outcome. We recognize that the challenges of accessibility constantly evolve along with technology, scholarship, culture, and society.
• We comply with human right laws that mandate accessibility, including  Ontario’s Human Rights Code and the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). These legislations have been implemented to help rebalance a systemically inequitable society wherein some groups of people are excluded from receiving or benefiting from the same opportunities to which many people have access. 
• We commit to engaging community members who experience access barriers in creation of solutions.
• We understand accessibility as an opportunity to rethink and transform our culture through participation and redesign (Brewer, Selfe, and Yergeau, 2014)