Co-design knowledge mobilization tools for universal accessibility in municipalities.
Maëlle Corcuff, Marie-Eve Lamontagne, François Routhier and 1 others
PMID 39011086WHAT IT FOUND
Municipal employees reported lacking resources and awareness of accessibility plans.
Co-designing short videos with staff and persons with disabilities addressed identified needs. No clinical outcomes were measured, so this describes a process rather than a tested intervention.
Key findings
01Survey respondents reported that universal accessibility principles were complex and hard to implement, with many lacking resources or awareness of the city's action plan.
02Employees identified visual information tools, such as videos and infographics, as the most needed resource for implementing accessibility measures.
03The study co-designed three video vignettes involving municipal employees and one person with an intellectual disability to address barriers identified in the exploration phase.
STILL TO COME
How it was doneWhat they found
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What it does not show
The study reports the development and validation of tools but does not evaluate their implementation or impact on accessibility outcomes. Only one person with a disability was involved in the creation of the videos, which may limit the representation of lived experience. The survey response rate was 32%, which may introduce selection bias. The study was conducted in a single large municipality, limiting generalizability to other organizational contexts.
Declared interests
The research was funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) partnership program, with additional scholarships from Fonds de Recherche du Québec.
The easy way to misread this
Do not interpret the development of these video tools as evidence that they improve universal accessibility outcomes or employee behavior. The study describes a co-design process and reports needs assessments, but it did not test the effectiveness of the resulting tools.