Barriers to accessibility among persons with disabilities in Canada

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This dashboard allows users to examine data on barriers to accessibility experienced by persons with disabilities. These are barriers encountered in different aspects of daily living focused on those found in public spaces; communicating in different situations; using the Internet, and barriers related to behaviours, misconceptions or assumptions by others.

The data in this dashboard comes from the 2022 Canadian Survey on Disability (CSD). The CSD is a national survey of persons aged 15 years and over whose everyday activities are limited due to a long-term condition or health-related problem. The CSD sample is selected from the Census of Population respondents making it a postcensal survey. For more methodological details see Canadian Survey on Disability, 2022: Concepts and Methods Guide.

The CSD collected information on 27 types of barriers to accessibility, touching on the Accessible Canada Act priority areas of Built Environment, Communication and Information and Communication Technology. These barriers do not represent a comprehensive list of barriers to accessibility. Respondents were asked if they experienced barriers because of their condition using the response categories of “not applicable,” “never,” “sometimes,” “often,” and “always.” Respondents who indicated that they experienced barriers “sometimes,” “often,” or “always” are included as having experienced barriers. See the CSD questionnaire for more information on barriers to accessibility included within the survey.

A global severity score was developed for the CSD, which was calculated for each person using the number of disability types that a person has, the level of difficulty experienced in performing certain tasks, and the frequency of activity limitations. It is important to understand, however, that the name assigned to each class is simply intended to facilitate use of the severity score and is not a label or judgment concerning the person's level of disability.

Persons with disabilities often have multiple co-occurring disability types.

Given that the non-binary population is small, data aggregation to a two-category gender variable is sometimes necessary to protect the confidentiality of responses provided. In these cases, individuals in the category “non-binary persons” are distributed into the other two gender categories and are denoted by the “+” symbol.

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