About this project

Background

In July 2019, the Accessible Canada Act (ACA) came into force, with the goal of making Canada barrier-free to people with disabilities and Deaf people by 2040. This requires Federally Regulated Organizations (FRO’s) to consult with the disability and Deaf community to create an Accessibility Plan on how they will make their organization barrier-free, and implement their plan. Read more about the ACA here.

TAE aims to facilitate the connection between FRO’s and the disability and Deaf community, so that these consultations can take place in an equitable and intersectional way.

Live website

TAE is currently live, and in a testing phase with friends and family. Check the platform out.

Upcoming Schedule (2024)

TAE platform is largely focused on development and release of features currently. See below for the upcoming schedule of releases.

Project phases

Initial platform co-design (2021-2022)

In this initial co-design period, we did various co-design engagements with 100+ members of the disability and Deaf community, including individuals and community organizations. We also did co-design with members from FRO’s. The goal of this phase was to understand what an accessible and inclusive consultation process should be like, and get feedback on it at various points in the process.

Usability and Accessibility testing (2022-2023)

During this period, we tested the features on the platform with various assistive technology users and Sign Language users. The goal was to ensure the platform was as accessible as possible with a wide variety of users.

Service design (2023-2024)

We had feedback in early co-design phases about how this platform needed to be a service, as it is not possible to make a digital platform accessible to all people with disabilities and Deaf people. At this point, there was also a creation of a Service Organization to support the functionality of the platform. The goal was to do a service design audit of the current user experience from end to end, and to identify the gaps and opportunities for improvement.

Partners

• IRIS Institute

• ARCH Disability Law Centre

• Chronicle Analytics

Steering committee

• British Columbia Aboriginal Network on Disability Society

• Canadian Association for Community Living

• Canadian Association of the Deaf - Association des Sourds du Canada

• Canadian Council on Rehabilitation and Work

• Council of Canadians with Disabilities.

• DisAbled Women’s Network (DAWN) Canada

• Realize

• Spinal Cord Injury

• CanadaAbility Centre

• Active Living Alliance for Canadians with a Disability

• Alliance for Equality of Blind Canadians

• Barrier Free Canada

• Canadian Cultural Society of the Deaf

• Canadian Hard of Hearing Association

• CNIB Foundation

• Communication Disabilities Access Canada

• Community Living Toronto

• Every Canadian Counts Coalition

• March of Dimes

• Muscular Dystrophy Association of Canada

• People First of Canada

• The Rick Hansen Foundation

Project documents

Working documents

Documents being worked on actively.

Code

• GitHub Repo

• Issue Tracker

• Releases

Design

• User Flows

• Wireframes

Reference documents

Documents to reference for current work.

Release process & testing

• Roadmap

• Release Process

• Testing

  • Community Organizations

  • Individuals

  • Regulated Organizations

  • Training Participants

Co-design reports

All the reports for co-designs done in the past.

Discovery co-design

• Synthesis reports for each group involved (Physical disabilities, neurodivergence / cognitive, BIPOC, 2SLGBTQIA+, Indigenous, family and supporters)

• Overall synthesis documents

Brainstorming co-design

• Rough sketches from each group

Refinement co-design

• Report on co-designing the matching algorithm

Usability and Accessibility testing reports

• Soft launch

• Sign Language testing

Service Design reports

• Audit report

• Service blueprint

IDRC Project Team

Design

• Cheryl Li

• Sepideh Shahi

Development

• Justin Obara

• Ned Zimmerman

• Daniel Cho

Project management

• Michelle D’Souza

• Colin Clark