Speaker 1: Our principles and values include collaboration and shared responsibility. So the mandate of Access Ryerson is to become a leader of excellence in accessibility and inclusion. When we're addressing systemic barriers, we want to identify, remove and prevent barriers to inclusion. And that means going beyond strictly what the AODA, the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act requires of us.

Speaker 2: The AODA has been a sort of historical kind of game changer. So the years in which an understanding of disability was so individualized and so based on tragedy and so based on medicalization, that to have a piece of legislation, hard one for sure, that talks about systemic barriers and removing obstacles, has in a way just changed the game and the field is kind of wide open now for an examination of this. It has been energizing, it's been politicizing. You can see barriers everywhere and that then calls for collaboration to remove them.

Speaker 3: Tangled Arts is really committed to exploring new, innovative, creative ways to make the arts accessible. So we comply with standards of the AODA, but we're really interested in stretching beyond that by offering a full designation of accessibility arts. A founding board member of Abilities Arts Festival, which Tangled Arts now is, was one of the founding faculty members of the School of Disability Studies.

Speaker 2: I can think of an example of an external partnership related to a class project that took place at the School of Disability Studies in 2008 and that related to creating an exhibit on activist disability history in Canada. Students were invited to bring an object of some significance to Canadian disability history, describe why it was important and we mounted this exhibit for the Abilities Arts Festival at their invitation.

Speaker 3: In 2001, the School of Disability Studies offered the first public programming of disability arts in Canada with its Arts with Attitude program, which still continues and by continuing that program, the school continues to cultivate and publicly showcase the best of Canadian disability arts. So the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson really supported Tangled's production of Push, which was programmed in the Parapan Am Games last summer. And with Ryerson's support, we were able to offer audio description, real-time captioning and ASL interpretation of every production of the play.

Speaker 4: Students come from a variety of different programs and places of work. We have students coming from the non-profit sector and the for-profit. We have students involved with publishing and education.

Speaker 3: So I think because of, again, our collaborative relationship, the script was allowed to evolve in a way consistent with disability studies and I think made it a lot stronger and a lot more relevant to the disability community.

Speaker 5: When we all come together and talk and exchange our experiences of barriers and, you know, hard accommodation, that's when you realize that, hey, this is not just an individual issue and we can all come, we can all bring solutions to the table as well.

Speaker 3: I really think partnerships are important because they give us access to different communities and new users who can give input into how to make arts more accessible.

Speaker 2: Well, if you come with a disability lens and a commitment to accessibility, you find opportunities through innovation to be advancing the agenda of both social change and greater inclusion.