Accessibility session with Luke Anderson

By Jason Shiu

Silver Visioneers actively participated in the discussion about Accessibility 

What is Accessibility? Accessibility (in broad terms) is the availability of resources, services and areas for everybody regardless of a person’s condition. On Monday we, Vision Youth, journeyed downtown to the Centre for Social Innovation to learn more about people who face this issue everyday. There, we met Luke Anderson; an engineer who is dedicated to make public areas and services more accessible. He is also...a wheelchair user.

Luke Anderson leading the discussion

Luke wasn’t always a wheelchair user - in the past he was physically active and an avid mountain biker. It was only until a mountain biking accident where he suffered a spinal cord injury that he needed to use a wheelchair and started to notice that the world we lived in wasn’t friendly to wheelchair users.

More discussion on Accessibility

During his presentation, we were brought to attention how we lived in a world where it is not very accessible for wheelchair users. He described the many frustrations he faced performing daily tasks and going about his life, most that we weren’t aware until he brought it up and even he wasn’t aware until he had to use a wheelchair. From there sparked an organization he created to address one of the many problems he faced and many other wheelchair users face; the StopGap Foundation.

For many buildings as you may notice, there is a single stair step that one is required to take to entire a store, office building, etc., and because of this step a lot of buildings that have it are inaccessible for wheelchair users. StopGap aims to solve that issue; by building a small ramp and putting it in front of the building it allows wheelchair users access to the building. StopGap has given ramps to many buildings in the GTA and has expanded to other areas in Ontario such as Kingston and Ottawa. Last year we also met with him and he kindly gave us one the StopGap ramps to use - it turns out our Vision Youth office also had this single-step in front of the entrance. Luke described the single-step as one of the many physical barriers society is generally not aware of that is affecting people like him and other people with other conditions.

The ramp in front of our office was donated by StopGap.ca

One of the highlights of our meet-up with Luke is a workshop that he ran with us. He posed the problem of the “Push to open” button that is featured next to many public entrances and exits that when pushed, automatically opens the door for the user. He gave us a challenge to redesign the button (whether the button itself, the wheelchair symbol, etc.) to allow better access for everybody entering or exiting a public place. In the 40 minutes of generating ideas, coming up with a solution, prototyping and presenting it was one of the few moments our group was really into the activity. There was so much conversation and back-and-forth between the kids about how to redesign this button and the longer the workshop was the more excited they seemed to be. It was a refreshing moment to witness teens having this type of energy for designing something for the benefit of others and we hope we could recreate the same feeling for them in future sessions.

Silver Visioneers were providing solutions to Accessibility

We learned a great deal from Luke and had a wonderful experience collaborating with him! We look forward in learning more from him in the near future and open our eyes about the world around us. Check out Luke Anderson and the StopGap Foundation at StopGap.ca