Ontario was one of the first provinces to enact disability legislation to protect this right in 2005 with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA). With its subsequent standard regulations (employment, customer service, communications, transportation and the built environment), they were intended to ensure the Province was accessible by 2025. To track its progress, third party evaluators were hired to conduct public engagement and a formal evaluation in 2010 (Beer), 2015 (Moran), 2019 (Onley) and 2023/2024 (Donovan). Despite almost 20 years since its enactment, disabled people still regularly encounter exclusionary barriers in all areas of which the AODA covers. Disability remains peripheral to planning practice/policy, allowing disability to be viewed as a supplementary matter and treated inconsistently or ignored entirely.

We wanted to understand how we got to this point through a discourse analysis of the four evaluations tracking the AODA’s progress and newsmedia to examine associated public discourse. Our analysis considers how the evaluations framed different problems, utilized rhetoric devices and vocabulary, invoked intertextuality of diverse policies/legislation/regulations, and diverse actors and their responsibilities–revealing the authors’ understanding of disability and accessibility and associating their words with theories of disability. We also document issues around the limited scope of the AODA in architecture, overwhelming focus on features that address physical disabilities only, leniency in the overarching issue of ‘cost’, and the lack of clarity around what access means for architects and allied professionals.