Assessing the Accessibility of Proactive and Reactive Emergency Management Standards
Table of Contents
Project Summary
The research project will evaluate the accessibility of emergency management measures in Canada and of the federal standards that guide preparations for and responses to emergency situations. Our team will ask how persons with disabilities experience, interact with, and respond to emergency moments in ways that differ from persons without disabilities and if current proactive and reactive emergency management measures are sufficiently inclusive of these disability experiences. We will investigate built environments and transportation systems (airports, airplanes, trains, train stations) as sites of emergency management and response.
A person’s cognitive processing affects how they may perceive and respond to environmental information (signs, audio alarms, light alarms), interpersonal communication (announcements, staff guides, emergency personnel), and environmental information (situational awareness, recognizing danger states). Guided by an intersectional group of lived experience experts, our team will focus particularly on barriers to persons with cognitive disabilities as an understudied and under-served group.
Funding
The Accessibility Institute applied for and was awarded $600,000 in funding over three years from Accessibility Standards Canada through the Advancing Accessibility Standards Research Program.
Project Team
- Boris Vukovic, Accessibility Institute Lead
- Sonia Rahimi, Research Lead
Advisory Committee
- Dr. Nirupama Agrawal
- Dr. Ron Buliung
- Dr. Virginie Cobigo (On leave)
- Dr. Max Kinateder
- Dr. Munazza Tahir
- Dr. Boris Vukovic
Project Partners
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Dr. Virginie Cobigo is Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Ottawa and Founder and Executive Director of the Open Collaboration for Cognitive Accessibility. Her research focuses on how best to support the social inclusion of persons with cognitive, intellectual, and developmental disabilities, monitoring barriers and facilitators to social inclusion, developing and testing solutions for the cognitive accessibility of environments, and fostering inclusive research approaches.
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Open Collaboration for Cognitive Accessibility is a non-profit national disability organization devoted to a world where people of all cognitive abilities can function to the best of their potential. Centering co-creation with lived experience experts, they bring persons with a range of cognitive abilities together with researchers and accessibility specialists, combining their knowledge and experience to test, improve and assure cognitive accessibility. Open will lead this project’s community consultations with lived experience advisors.
This study will also leverage the Canadian Accessibility Network’s (CAN) professional and community knowledge pool.
Contact
For inquiries about this project, please contact Boris Vukovic.