How Maayan Ziv, advocate and activist, is helping festivals welcome guests with accessibility needs | Canada Voices

The Globe and Mail’s Accessibility Profiles by Graham Isador feature conversations highlighting disabled artists, creators and community leaders.

With festival season starting up, folks across the country are beginning to think about what musical performances and cultural events to attend this summer. But for Canadians living with a disability, there’s an extra amount of planning needed to make sure event venues will be accessible.

What is the washroom situation like? What are the sightlines? Are there paved pathways throughout the grounds? Will there be American Sign Language interpretation or captioning? According to Maayan Ziv, the founder and CEO of AccessNow, even when festivals live up to accessibility standards from a legal perspective, it doesn’t always translate to an enjoyable experience for attendees with disabilities.

“There is a difference between retrofitting accessible infrastructure onto something that isn’t made for disabled people and creating an experience with accessibility in mind,” said Ziv, who is a wheelchair user living with muscular dystrophy. She recently wrote an essay for Afar Magazine, pointing to how barebones access measures at music festivals such as Coachella and Burning Man keep many people with disabilities from meaningfully participating in the events, or sometimes attending at all.

Those are some of the barriers Ziv and her team were trying to overcome when they created AccessFest. Celebrating its second year on June 6th, the downtown Toronto event is billed as “the world’s most accessible festival” and features a number of workshops, talks and performances by artists having lived experience with disabilities.

In addition to programming curated through an accessibility lens, the fest also attempts to create an experience where anyone living with a disability can attend without barriers to engagement. Recently we had the chance to speak with Ziv about improvements festivals could make for attendees with access needs and the decision to create AccessFest.

In a recent article, you wrote about how just because a festival meets legal access standards, it doesn’t automatically mean the experience is enjoyable for people with access needs. Can you talk to me about that?

People are building experiences for certain audiences, for mainstream audiences, and forgetting that disability population is 27 per cent or more. What that means is a lot of retrofits. Accessibility gets bolted on or integrated back into an experience that’s already been built. Accessibility isn’t truly understood for the power that it offers. It’s still being treated like compliance. Within the event industry, everything is about experience. For me, that’s a really big missed opportunity.

There’s a gap between the infrastructure and the experience.

An example is the Rogers Stadium that was created last summer in Toronto. When we think about the accessibility of that experience, it wasn’t really focused on choice. It was focused on, okay, a wheelchair user needs to get to the stadium. We’re going to create one entrance and one path. That’s the accessible route. Functionally from an infrastructure perspective, it gets the job done. But disabled people are also looking for the opportunity to be immersed within an event.

Figuring out ways for people with disabilities to socialize and not be isolated to a specific platform where they can’t be with all their friends. Being able to navigate through a broad festival campus environment and be able to access all of the meaningful parts of the environment. Those are the ways where we start to move beyond compliance into meaningful, participatory, assets. When we start embracing accessibility as a form of good experience-inclusive design, we can just give people the dignity and the empowerment to feel that they belong.

Does this speak to some of the consulting work you do with AccessNow?

Last year we launched our first ever event. We call it AccessFest, which is our take on a festival. And really the goal is to celebrate accessibility in the world and the people who make it so, and celebrate identity and the importance of disabled culture.

When you say disabled culture, what does that mean to you?

It’s not just this medical-model approach, where people often assume that disability is a bad thing or some type of illness that needs to be cured. When I look at disability, I see a culture. I see a shared practice, a history, art form, multiple languages. It’s the way we understand and perceive the world. When we look at the very rich history of advocates and activists and artists with disabilities, we can start to piece together a very meaningful culture that’s defined by a shared desire to create access in the world and also do it on our own terms.

When you’re talking about trying to create the festival with disability in mind, with access in mind, what does that mean for you?

It comes down to having an accessibility lens on every decision. It’s everything from location and ease of access via multiple ways of transportation. It means having access to different types of washroom needs, like spaces that are large enough for people to actually access comfortably using mobility devices. We have quiet spaces and calm spaces and sensory kits. We provide enough information in advance so people understand things like navigation through the site map before they arrive.

Every decision we made at the festival was constructed to create a space where you could show up on your own terms. You didn’t need to go to an access desk unless you wanted to. Everything could be accessible to the best of our capacity. Our main stage is a space to celebrate disabled artists and leaders. Last year every single one of our performances was led by a disabled person, and we’re going to continue to follow that track record: celebrating the artists that are part of this culture and recognizing them for who they are, which is artists first with lived experience of disability informing their craft.

This interview has been edited and condensed.