THUNDER BAY — A flag was raised on Wednesday at city hall for National AccessAbility week.
Scott Garner, the city's municipal accessibility specialist, said it's important to acknowledge the contributions that people with disabilities make to the community.
"We have a municipal accessibility advisory committee who advises city administration on how to remove barriers for people with disabilities in our community. This helps ensure that people with disabilities are able to contribute and get to work, get to school, be able to take public transportation and even be able to receive accessible customer service when they need to as well from all of our city facilities, and staff too."
The city's next accessibility plan for 2024 to 2029 is on track, Garner said.
"This will highlight a lot of the barriers that we've removed over the past five years. We're actually on track for meeting the targets set out for 2025. We've discovered more barriers that we've been removing as well, say to our website.
"So some of those are highlighted in the, in the multi-year accessibility plan, and we've simplified some of the language too. That's important for people to have a better understanding of making sure that it's a document that is really accessible to everyone."
Samantha Zrobin, chair of the accessibility advisory committee with the City of Thunder Bay, said she's seen much improvement regarding physical accessibility across the city and continues to advocate for more.
"We're trying to have more ramps and curb cuts in the Bay and Algoma area, we're really advocating for that. As well as that new park at Vickers Park.
"For mobility disabilities especially, it's just being able to get into stores and cafes, malls and even places with high ramps and turnovers is really hard to get into. And then the invisible disabilities as well, where other people don't know what they're facing and may not be able to help them just as much as they should be."
National AccessAbility Week is recognized from May 26 to June 1.
Katie Nicholls is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter with Newswatch
