ACCESSIBILITY

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Articles

Current Research

Accessibility in Vermont’s Natural Outdoor Spaces

At CDCI, we partnered with Nature Conservancy Vermont to try to answer the question:

“What kind of accessibility features are most important to people when they visit Vermont’s outdoor natural spaces?”

We shared out a brief survey and found that the most important accessibility feature was accessible trip planning materials, shortly followed by having benches along the trail, and making the trail fully accessible.

As the organizations that manage Vermont’s natural outdoor spaces think about accessibility, we need to know specifically how to make them accessible. We need to know what’s important to the people who visit — or want to visit — those spaces. But the more people tell those organizations about accessibility being Extremely Important, the more accessibility will be prioritized.

And without studies like these, organizations might guess about how to make spaces more accessible — and they might guess wrong.

LEARN MORE ABOUT ATTITUDES ON ACCESSIBILITY IN VERMONT’S NATURAL OUTDOOR SPACES

Changing Institutional Attitudes Around Accessibility

In most organizations, accessibility is an after-thought. An add-on, something to try to remember to do after creating a flyer, webpage, document, presentation, or video. At the same time, research shows us that building in accessibility from the beginning of any digital publication saves time and money. 

So how do we change attitudes toward accessibility? How do we make accessibility a “must-have”?

Over the course of the 2022-2023 academic year, CDCI tried to change attitudes toward accessibility in our own organization by providing a series of seven entry-level, free, accessible online workshops for our staff. 

We began in May 2022 by collecting qualitative and quantitative data about attitudes about accessibility among our staff. We collected data to see whether or how those attitudes have changed, and shared the results at the Association of University Centers on Disability national conference, in November 2023.

Learn more about our findings.

UVM’s Accessible Events Guide

I led a coalition of Vermont disability advocacy organizations, including the UVM Center on Disability & Community Inclusion, All Brains Belong VT, Inclusive Arts Vermont, and people from UVM’s Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, in creating UVM’s first Accessible Events Guide.

The guide includes what to do before, during, and after both in-person and virtual events, as well as covering fundamentals on disability rights and inclusion as they pertain to events.