Visualizing Accessibility Standards

Codes, standards, guidelines, and other similar regulatory documents that dictate the design of the built environment are often highly technical and text-heavy documents. A reliance on text-based content makes these documents unfriendly to many of the audiences who use them and can even lead to misinterpretation or too-rigid application of the standards in real spaces. Clearer communication of the form and intent of built environment standards, especially of accessibility standards, can have a lasting impact on the public and private spaces of our communities. The goal of this project is, therefore, to make a case for transforming design standards like Canada’s National Standard for accessibility in the built environment (B651-18) from a technically-focused document to a more communicable tool.

We hope that doing so will support better understanding of accessibility requirements by planners, architects, engineers, developers/building owners, and others using this document.

Thanks to funding from Accessibility Standards Canada’s Advancing Accessibility Standards Research grant, we developed a pilot set of visual media (e.g., diagrams, annotated photos, videos) for select sections of B651-18 to publish and test on a public website as a digital communication tool. Professionals who use the standards provided us with a wealth of feedback on the visualizations to inform this research.

We are pleased to share a copy of the Findings Report from the research below. A separate website, called Canadian Accessibility Standards (CAS) Viewer, catalogues the visualizations tested through this research.