What if the biggest barrier to healthcare isn't the clinic, but getting there?

For more than two decades, Paul Siller has run the Rocky View Regional Handibus Society, a rural charity that gets people to the appointments, groceries, and everyday places they can't reach on their own.

In this episode of the Accessible Future Podcast, Paul and host Simon Jones reframe what accessible transportation actually means: why Paul stopped using the word "handicap," how a single bus can serve three towns in one run, and why he calls transportation a foundation of health that almost no one budgets for.

It's a grounded look at the systems behind disability, inclusion, and barrier-free communities in rural Alberta, and the people left stranded when the ride isn't there.

In this episode:

• Why "transportation barriers" works better than "disability," and what shifted when the language changed
• How one bus covers 4,500 square kilometres and 600,000 km a year on about a third of a city's budget
• The rural access gap: ten communities around Calgary, zero hospitals
• What happens to someone's independence when the ride disappears
• Making councils care, using a story instead of a statistic

🔗 Learn more about the Rocky View Regional Handibus Society, including how to support or volunteer: https://www.rockyviewbus.ca

🔗 Follow Accessible Future Podcast

YouTube: youtube.com/@AccessibleFuture

Instagram: instagram.com/accessible_future

Facebook: facebook.com/people/Accessible-Future/61586380868685

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/accessible-future

Email: accessiblefuturepod@gmail.com

If you found value in this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating on your platform. It helps more people find the show.

⏰Chapters

0:00 Welcome to the Accessible Future Podcast

1:18 Inside the Rocky View Handibus Society

5:59 What an Accessible Future Looks Like

9:20 When the Rules Ignore Accessibility

13:02 Dropping the Word "Handicap"

16:59 Barriers, Not Disability

21:17 Transportation Is a Foundation of Health

23:06 Telling the Story to Make Councils Care

25:16 What Paul Wishes People Understood

27:37 Thank You to the Drivers

#AccessibleFuture #Accessibility #DisabilityInclusion #BarrierFree #AccessibleTransportation #DisabilityRights #InclusiveCommunities #RuralTransit #DisabilityCommunity

Kelly Thibodeau builds her work around one idea: accessibility is personal.
The founder of Squarely Accessible joins Simon to talk about what inclusive design actually means online, and why so much of it comes down to a single choice, including people on purpose, or excluding them by accident.

Kelly shares the story of watching her mom's world shrink as technology moved on without her, the business case most organizations overlook, and where to start when accessibility feels too big to tackle.

IN THIS EPISODE

• Why Kelly says accessibility is personal, and the story behind Squarely Accessible
• What an accessible future looks like when everyone can do the everyday things — applying for a job, filing taxes, catching up with friends
• The difference between being intentionally included and accidentally excluded
• Why 80% of disabilities are invisible, and what that means for the content we publish
• The numbers brands miss: 1.3 billion people worldwide, and the customers lost to barriers
• "Do you want it, or do you need it?" — moving past compliance to actually caring
• Small starts, why there's no such thing as "100% done," and how to begin anyway
• Masking at work, and building workplaces where people don't have to hide who they are
• "Nothing about us without us": working with disabled people, not just for them
  👋 Guest - Kelly Thibodeau, Squarely Accessible

Website: squarelyaccessible.com

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kthibodeau

Level It Up: levelitupmb.ca

🔗 Follow Accessible Future Podcast

YouTube: youtube.com/@AccessibleFuture

Instagram: instagram.com/accessible_future

Facebook: facebook.com/people/Accessible-Future/61586380868685

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/accessible-future

Email: accessiblefuturepod@gmail.com

If you found value in this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating on your platform. It helps more people find the show.
⏰Chapters0:00 Intro1:28 What an accessible future looks like4:07 Her mom, and why accessibility is personal8:10 Inside Squarely Accessible12:03 Want it vs. need it: beyond compliance17:48 Training, invisible disabilities & the business case24:25 Neuroinclusion, autism employment & a final word32:33 Wrap-up

Chrissy Sadowski spent years caring for her mother, who has MS, without anyone calling it caregiving. She was a teenager seeking help who was told no. She was a young adult who grew up in a house full of unknowns and ambulance visits and learned to move on.

It wasn't until she was 38 years old, sitting in a room with the Young Caregivers Association, that it clicked. She had been a young caregiver the whole time.

Now Chrissy works for the YCA. Canada's only dedicated young caregiver organization and she's using everything she lived through to build the support system that didn't exist when she needed it.

She's also living with MS herself, navigating a condition that was invisible for 15 years before her right leg started to change.

In this episode, Chrissy talks about what it actually means to be a young caregiver, including why a five-year-old reading to their sibling so a parent can shower counts, and what the healthcare system keeps getting wrong.

She shares the story of her son Darius going missing last summer, how first responders initially responded, and how that incident turned into police training and a vulnerable persons registry coming to Niagara Region.

She also talks about group home wait lists, the gap in respite care, and what she'd say to every parent, educator, and healthcare professional who still doesn't know this population exists.

👋 Guest - Chrissy Sadowski

Instagram - instagram.com/freshprincesschris/

YCA - youngcaregivers.ca

🔗 Follow Accessible Future Podcast

YouTube: youtube.com/@AccessibleFuture

Instagram: instagram.com/accessible_future

Facebook: facebook.com/people/Accessible-Future/61586380868685

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/accessible-future

Email: accessiblefuturepod@gmail.com

If you found value in this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating on your platform. It helps more people find the show.

⏰Chapters

0:00 Intro

1:29 What is the Young Caregivers Association?

11:01 What does an accessible future look like?

14:29 Growing up a young caregiver — without knowing it

19:07 Living with MS — from invisible to mobility aid

22:03 How disability changes the way the world treats you

27:13 Sharing the reality of MS on social media

30:04 Advocating for people with intellectual disabilities

33:03 Darius goes missing — and a registry gets built

37:12 One thing every listener should understand

39:15 Where to find Chrissy and YCA

40:33 Simon's closing thoughts

Beth Deer is a reporter and podcast host for AMI, Canada's accessible media broadcaster, and shares life as a blind person with her followers under @the_blind_girlie. She was born with optic nerve hypoplasia and lost the functional vision she grew up with at 13 following a surgery that went wrong.

In this episode: her Zootopia theory of what an accessible world actually looks like, the difference between navigating with a white cane versus a guide dog, the story of her guide dogs, and why the kindness of strangers is both the biggest barrier and the best thing about being blind.
👉 In This Episode

• What optic nerve hypoplasia actually is, and why Beth's level of vision confused specialists for years

• The surgery at 13 that changed everything

• Her Zootopia theory of accessibility: what a world looks like when it's built for everyone from the start

• The difference between travelling with a white cane and a guide dog, and what that gap reveals about how society sees disability

• Patronus: the guide dog who loved crowds, hated fetch, and whose illness brought vets across North America together rooting for him

• The 18 months without a guide dog. What independence actually means for day-to-day life and mental health

• Parenting while blind: What's genuinely hard, and what isn't

• Why the biggest barrier in Beth's life isn't a broken curb or a missing ramp

👋 Guest - Beth Deer

Instagram: instagram.com/the_blind_girlieTikTok: tiktok.com/@the_blind_girlie

AMI Reflections Podcast: https://www.amiplus.ca/Reflections

🔗 Follow Accessible Future Podcast

YouTube: youtube.com/@AccessibleFuture

Instagram: instagram.com/accessible_future

Facebook: facebook.com/people/Accessible-Future/61586380868685

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/company/accessible-future

Email: accessiblefuturepod@gmail.com

If you found value in this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating on your platform. It helps more people find the show.

⏰Chapters

0:00 Introduction

0:56 Beth's Background — From England to Canada

3:34 Losing Her Sight — Optic Nerve Hypoplasia

8:20 What an Accessible Future Looks Like

10:43 What a Guide Dog Actually Does

15:54 What People Get Wrong About Blindness

18:28 Patronus, Churro, and the Guide Dog Journey

31:07 How Society Views Disability

33:25 Parenting While Blind

35:59 One Thing Every Listener Should Know

36:55 Outro

Most conversations about accessibility focus on ramps, apps, and adaptive features.

Luke Mellor thinks there’s a missing link. If transit itself doesn't show up when you need it, or doesn't go where you need to go, none of the rest of it matters.

Luke works at Pantonium, a Canadian company that builds on-demand transit software rooted in the paratransit space. In this episode, he breaks down why technology can be a barrier just as easily as it can be a solution, how a near-empty Belleville night bus became one of Ontario's first successful on-demand transit deployments, and what transit poverty looks like in both urban cores and remote Indigenous communities.

He also makes a case that most on-demand transit pilots fail not because the technology doesn't work, but because transit agencies don't go big enough to find out.

👉 In This Episode

• Why adding technology to transit automatically creates new barriers. And what Pantonium does about it

• The 'perfect app' problem: how a flawlessly accessible app can still fail the person using it

• The Belleville story: a night bus nobody rode, 300-400 stops made available on demand, and a 300% ridership jump

• What transport poverty looks like when you map income data over a transit network

• How Indigenous communities across Canada are navigating the chicken-and-egg of transit access and economic opportunity

• The dialysis case: why reliable transit is, for some people, a matter of life and death

• What Luke would tell a room full of transit directors today

👋 Guest

Luke Mellor - Pantonium

Reach out at www.pantonium.com

🔗 Follow Accessible Future Podcast

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AccessibleFuture

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/accessible_future/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/people/Accessible-Future/61586380868685

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/accessible-future/

Email: accessiblefuturepod@gmail.com

If you found value in this episode, please subscribe and leave a rating on your platform. It helps more people find the show.

⏰Chapters

0:00 Cold Open

0:12 Intro

1:45 Luke's Background

3:10 What is Pantonium?

5:20 Accessible Future Philosophy

9:00 Removing Barriers in Practice

13:30 Fleet & Vehicle Accessibility

17:00 Right-Sizing for Communities

21:30 What is Macro Transit?

26:00 The Belleville Story

31:30 Transport Poverty

36:00 Indigenous Communities & Transit

42:30 Connectivity in Remote Communities

45:00 The ROI of Transit Investment

52:30 Message to Transit Directors

55:30 How to Reach Pantonium

56:00 Outro

Jubilee Dueck-Thiessen is the Executive Director of the Manitoba Down Syndrome Society. She started with MDSS as a student, spent years at L'Arche Winnipeg leading community programs and a major accessibility-focused art exhibit, and has now returned to MDSS to lead the organization.

In this episode, she makes a case for seeing disability not through a medical lens, asking what's wrong and how to fix it, but through a social one: asking what barriers society has built, and how we start tearing them down.

From reframing Down syndrome diagnoses as something to celebrate rather than apologize for, to questioning whether our standards of independence and productivity were ever designed for everyone, Jubilee brings a perspective on disability rights and inclusive community that's worth sitting with.

Connect With Manitoba Down Syndrome Society:

Website: https://manitobadownsyndromesociety.com

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ManitobaDownSyndromeSociety/

Instagram: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mbdownsyndrome
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/mbdownsyndrome

Connect With Us

Facebook: facebook.com/accessiblefuture

Instagram: instagram.com/accessiblefuture

Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/accessible-future/

Email: accessiblefuturepod@gmail.com

Chapters:

00:00 — Introduction

01:21 — Meet Jubilee Dueck-Thiessen

03:21 — From university volunteer to Executive Director

05:19 — What MDSS does and who it serves

07:24 — The accessible future: barriers we need to remove

07:38 — Medical model vs. social model of disability

10:26 — Why the productivity mindset hurts everyone

11:19 — What to say when a family gets a Down syndrome diagnosis

12:40 — The Eden Project: an accessible art exhibit at L'Arche

17:11 — Barriers to accessing nature

18:57 — Mutual care: moving from one-way to community support

21:00 — The L'Arche model and how it shaped Jubilee's work

22:29 — The cliff: what happens when young adults leave the school system

23:45 — Why disability organizations are being asked to do more with less

26:08 — How government and agencies can better align

26:43 — Burnout in the nonprofit sector and leading as a neurodivergent person

30:12 — Wrap up

In todays episode of Accessible Future, host Simon Jones sits down with three members of L'Arche Winnipeg, Grace, Mira, and Jordan, to talk about what barrier free living actually looks like when it goes beyond ramps and wheelchair access. L'Arche is built on the idea that people with and without intellectual disabilities can live together, share a home, and grow from one another. Not as a program, but as a way of life.

The conversation gets into the family model, the Community Circle day program, interdependence over independence, and why accessible relationships matter just as much as accessible spaces to the disability community. Plus the Walk with L'Arche is coming up May 3rd, and they'll tell you everything you need to know.

“An accessible future isn’t just about accessible spaces. It’s about accessible relationships.”

- Mira, L’Arche Winnipeg

Guest Links

• Website: https://www.larchewinnipeg.org

• Walk with L’Arche: https://www.larchewinnipeg.org/get-involved/the-walk/register-for-the-walk-with-larche/

• Jordan 411 Sports Show: https://www.youtube.com/@jordan411sports2

Connect With Us

• Facebook: facebook.com/accessiblefuture

• Instagram: instagram.com/accessiblefuture

• Linkedin: linkedin.com/company/accessible-future/

• Email: accessiblefuturepod@gmail.com

Chapters

0:00 Intro

1:23 Meet the Guests: Jordan, Grace & Mira

4:19 What Does an Accessible Future Look Like?

7:29 The Community Circle Program

11:23 Life at L’Arche: Jordan’s Perspective

12:29 The Family Model & Mutual Relationships

17:15 Living In, Grace’s Year Inside L’Arche

19:21 Interdependence vs Independence

23:23 What Does Belonging Really Mean?

25:00 The Walk with L’Arche — May 3rd

31:15 Final Reflections: What Would You Pass On?

35:18 Outro

What does a wheelchair fencer, criminal defence lawyer, datascientist, and accessibility auditor have in common? They're all Peter Tonge, and he's here to challenge how organizations think about disability inclusion.

In this episode, host Simon Jones sits down with Peter Tongeof Peter Tonge Consulting to explore what accessibility really means beyond the building code. Peter has been a wheelchair user since age four, worked as a data scientist at Statistics Canada, and earned his law degree at the University of Manitoba — all of which informs his uniquely practical approach to accessibility advocacy.

They cover why airlines damage wheelchairs on 25% of flightsyet somehow manage to transport racehorses safely, the real difference between legal compliance and cultural inclusion, how to make your website accessible for screen reader users, and what it actually takes to shift an organization's accessibility culture from checkbox to genuine commitment.

"An accessible future means assuming we're coming —not treating disability as an afterthought."

Guest Links

• Peter Tonge Consulting: petertongeconsulting.com
• Talking Rotary Podcast: talkingrotary.buzzsprout.com

Connect With Us

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/share/1HWP4o1yXo/?mibextid=wwXIfr
• Instagram: instagram.com/accessiblefuture⁠

• Email: accessiblefuturepod@gmail.com

Chapters:

00:00 Cold Open - Wheelchair Damage at 30,000 Feet

00:30 Welcome & Introduction to Peter Tonge

02:45 Wheelchair Rugby, Fencing & Sailing — Life Outside of Work

07:02 Growing Up as a Wheelchair User Since Age 4

10:09 From Statistics Canada to Law School

12:29 What Does an Accessible Future Look Like?

14:16 Airlines Transport Racehorses Safely — But Not My Wheelchair

20:48 Inside Peter Tonge Consulting

25:04 Gaps vs. Barriers — A Critical Distinction

35:22 Simon's Takeaways & Preview of the next Episode