Your Accessibility Committee is a collection of essays written during and participation in a school district’s accessibility committee: a process branded as collaborative, but engineered for control. This series explores institutional betrayal, process theatre, and the architecture of performative inclusion. It’s a record of what happens when access is promised but the implementation falls short—and what it costs to keep showing up anyway.
When I first opened the Vancouver School Board’s Accessibility Engagement Summary Report, I did what I always do with these kinds of documents—I made a beeline for the methodology, the numbers, the breakdown of who actually got to speak.
On page 10 I discovered that 2,855 people had participated; on page 11 I discovered that only 220 of them identified as having a disability, supporting someone with a disability, or both.
If you were trying to study prostates, would you let people into the study without prostates???
This is the part where my throat tightens. Because I already know what it feels like to be outnumbered in meetings about “inclusive education.” I know what it means to sit in a room where the people making decisions have no reference point for the daily logistics, the emotional toll, the small humiliations that come from trying to navigate an inaccessible system. And now, it seems, even the processes meant to fix those systems are designed around the voices of people who have never had to claw their way through them.
A survey of the unaffected tells you what the unaffected believe—not what exclusion feels like
The report is littered with caveats, hedges, acknowledgements that responses may reflect “a lack of lived experience and/or general knowledge.”
It notes that many respondents weren’t sure how to answer questions about systemic barriers, attitudinal prejudice, or technological exclusion. It admits, even, that there was a consistent mismatch between what people said in multiple-choice responses and what they later described in open-ended comments—meaning that even the data collection itself revealed confusion, contradiction, and a basic absence of understanding.
They didn’t want to know what hurt—they wanted to know what worked
What stunned me most, once I started reading carefully, was how the survey framed its open-ended questions. Over and over, it would ask whether you’d experienced a barrier—attitudinal, systemic, physical, technological—and if you said yes, the next prompt would be: Tell us how that barrier was removed. That was the story they wanted. Not the story of harm. Not the story of what your child lost, what you missed, what doors stayed closed. They didn’t give you a box to describe what happened, only a box to celebrate how it ended.
That’s not accessibility research. That’s a marketing exercise. That’s a form designed to collect good-news anecdotes, not confront institutional failure. That’s a choice—a deliberate one—to shape the data toward resolution, toward repair, toward some imaginary narrative of progress. And for those of us still stuck in the middle of the harm, it felt like an act of silencing.
What about the barriers that haven’t been removed? What about the students still without support, the classrooms without ramps, the families ghosted by district staff? The survey never asked about that.
And when families used the “removal” text box to instead describe what was still broken, the report noted it gently, almost bemusedly—as if participants had misunderstood the assignment, rather than responding with more integrity than the form allowed. The summary notes there were 182 comments on one of the barrier removal questions, and while we don’t get to see the comments, we can guess what they said.
If you don’t see a ramp missing, it’s because you don’t need one
The report treats physical barriers as the easiest to recognise, the most “obvious”—which is true, in a sense, but only if you’re looking through a very specific lens. Because even here, most community respondents said they weren’t aware of any physical barriers in their schools, despite an abundance of comments describing broken elevators, steep stairs, missing sensory spaces, and inadequate washrooms. And I can’t help but think: of course they didn’t notice. They weren’t trying to push a wheelchair through a gravel path. They weren’t carrying a dysregulated seven-year-old up three flights of stairs while holding an emergency change of clothes in their teeth.
What the survey measures, again and again, is the absence of need—interpreted as evidence that the system is working. And the people who most know it isn’t working—because they’re the ones stuck emailing three departments for a speech-language referral or begging for one-to-one support—those people get flattened into the margins.
Attitudinal barriers require lived experience to detect—and most respondents didn’t have it
This was the part that made me ache: the survey asked about attitudinal barriers, the kind that manifest as suspicion, minimisation, disbelief, or discomfort when disabled students express need or difference. But over a third of community respondents selected “Don’t know.” And while the report gently notes that this likely reflects a knowledge gap, I would go further: this is structural erasure. You cannot identify ableism if you don’t know what it looks like. And most people, frankly, have never had to learn.
When my child is dismissed, shamed, or pathologised for expressing needs that stem from a disability—when staff respond to distress by invoking discipline, or treat my careful accommodation requests as overprotective or unreasonable—that is an attitudinal barrier. And yet the people weighing in on this process have likely never seen it happen. Or worse, they’ve been the ones committing it without realising.
The closest metaphor I can think of is this: imagine if hospitals stopped offering treatment for heart attacks, and then designed a satisfaction survey asking every single patient—regardless of what brought them in—how they felt about the quality of cardiac care. That’s what this was. A broad opinion poll on a crisis only some people are living.
A trauma-informed survey cannot centre people who have never experienced trauma
The report makes repeated reference to education plans, equity goals, accessibility legislation. It uses the language of inclusion—“every voice is valued,” “clear information,” “sense of belonging.” But the very structure of the process betrays those principles. Because in a trauma-informed process, the people who have endured harm should shape the questions, not just answer them. Their testimony should weigh more, not less. And when a survey treats their experiences as equivalent to the general public’s “impressions,” that process re-enacts the very erasure it claims to address.
A boiling rage
This wasn’t the first time I boiled with rage over an inaccessible form, but coupled with my existing frustrations with the school system, I was spurred into action. I went and filled out another form to complain, and that is how I wound up joining an Accessibility Committee for the district.
Your Accessibility Committee
A collection of essays written during and after my participation in a school district’s accessibility committee: a process branded as collaborative, but engineered for control. This series explores institutional betrayal, process theatre, and the architecture of performative inclusion. It’s a record of what happens when access is promised but the implementation falls short—and what it costs to keep showing up anyway.
