DDA Talks to Nathan Shipley During National AccessAbility Week

Nathan Shipley was born with Cerebral Palsy. Today he is a public speaker and does not see himself as disabled. DDA reached out to him during National AccessAbility Week to talk about his life and what it means to build accessible communities.

 

TRANSCRIPT:

Evan Kelly  0:05   Welcome to the Developmental Disabilities Association's Encouraging Abilities podcast. Here we are on national accessibility week in Canada and we're connecting with people in the disability community chatting about their experiences, maybe what's working, what's not, and what we can all do better to promote accessibility and inclusion and hoping to raise a little awareness for the disability community. Joining me today is Nathan Shipley, a self advocate who has cerebral palsy and uses a wheelchair to navigate the world. He has a website called Rollingwithnathan.weebly.com. Thanks for joining us, Nathan. I'm happy you could be here.

Nathan Shipley  0:40   No problem at all. My pleasure. Yeah.

Evan Kelly  0:43   So what do public awareness events, like the national accessibility week mean to you?

Nathan Shipley  0:50   Um, good question. Thank you. I would say, always it's really good because it always raises awareness. It's always good to raise awareness. Especially to make places accessible is always important. And we're making good progress. But always having awareness weeks like this is always important.

Evan Kelly  1:24   So do you believe that weeks like this are helpful in generating public awareness?

Nathan Shipley  1:29   So yeah, I believe they're helpful in changing the narrative, however, like I was joking with my support aid earlier,  it should get to a point where there shouldn't have to be a national accessibility week. I mean, those, those are important and cool, all that stuff. But it should be, it should be just something that people should be aware of eventually, and most people are, fortunately, but it's always good, you know, always room to improve. Nothing, unfortunately, in the world is ever gonna be perfect. I don't think. As much as we try, right?

Evan Kelly  2:17   Yeah. Yeah. And you're in your 20s. Now. So, you know, obviously, you've been dealing with cerebral palsy your entire life, you've been in a wheelchair for that, for that time. Do you feel like things are getting better for the disability community?

Nathan Shipley  2:33   Of course, I would say in the last four or five years, there's a lot more awareness around, you know, building buildings. So they're not just... accessible is good. Being accessible is really good. But what they need to think about, and we will talk about this, is, making places accessible are good. But when they actually build the building, building it, so it's something called universal design, universally designed, and it's really acceptable, because accessible is good, but if you build it universally designed, it would save you money in the long run, because you won't have to renovate, you know, all the features will already be there. And that's a place where we're already going. So that is good. I would say the city of Surrey is a is a good example of that. They made a proclaim, they proclaimed last year, or this past year, I don't know when it was, that all civic buildings will be built to the gold standard, the ranking of the Rick Hansen Foundation meaning that there'll be no barriers to access, which is good. Does that make sense?

Evan Kelly  4:04   Yeah, that's, that's a really, really nice concept. I mean, for you know, for decades, since, you know, we've been around that whole idea of accessibility was was sort of, you know, good enough, I guess. And so when you enter something like that, where you have this concept, and it is a concept, there's this, this, this idea of universal design, in everything we do, is really maybe just a bigger, global perspective for the community at large. I really like that.

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