Ontario is one of four provinces in Canada with targeted accessibility legislation, with guidance for designers found in the Integrated Accessibility Standards Regulation, the Ontario Building Code and the Ontario Human Rights Code. We consider building to code to be completely inadequate, but there are some people who would go lower if they could, so we need the code as a bare minimum for non-believers." "The examples, the stuff we did in our studio, would be impossible to embed into a code, so I now look at codes as a base minimum. "The early part of my career I spent a lot of my energy, ‘the codes need to come up way higher, the codes are inadequate,’ and then I realized they would never get there," said Ruptash, whose practice at Quadrangle includes contributing to the website accessibilityadvantage.ca, a joint venture of the March of Dimes Canada and Quadrangle. That conception of universal design contained seven principles: equitable use, flexibility in use, simple and intuitive, with perceptible information, tolerance for error, low physical effort, and adequate size and space for approach and use. Mace, of North Carolina State University, defined universal design as "the design of products and environments to be usable by all people, to the greatest extent possible, without the need for adaptation or specialized design." Ruptash urged the architects in attendance to look instead to Scandinavia, where universal design - a concept that was called a significant step up from mere barrier-free or accessibility - has been the practice for decades, and to the standards established by design pioneer Ron Mace in 1997 and revised in 2012 by Steinfeld and Maisel, authors of the book Universal Design: Creating Inclusive Environments. The last round of national building code consultations codified in 2016 was billed as the accessibility round but it fell way short, said architect Susan Ruptash of Quadrangle Architects, who with colleague Lorene Casiez offered a presentation billed as The Past, Present and Future of Accessible Architecture on May 26. Ontario accessibility regulations and building code standards represent the bare minimum that architects should follow in building for accessibility, said two advocates for the concept of universal design who spoke at the recent Royal Architectural Institute of Canada conference held in Ottawa.
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