REGINA — Another government building has achieved an important accessibility milestone.
The T.C. Douglas Building has achieved its Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification Professional. The milestone was achieved in August and the province marked the occasion with a plaque unveiling Tuesday.
This comes following a building evaluation from a Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification professional covering entrances, washrooms, signage, lighting, acoustics and emergency systems.
Other executive buildings have achieved certification including the Legislative Building in 2021 and the LF McIntosh Building in Prince Albert in 2023.
Two more buildings, the Sturdy Stone Building in Saskatoon and Cooper Place in Regina, will also undergo the review and be certified next year. The indication is more are coming after that.
“Through the Saskatchewan Accessibility Act, SaskBuilds and Procurement is aiming to review all of its 515 government-owned buildings for accessibility by December 2027,” said Rob Hembroff, acting assistant deputy minister for operations and service delivery in the Ministry of SaskBuilds and Procurement.
The Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification is described by the organization as the world's leading building rating system. According to the province’s news release, it evaluates the level of meaningful access in buildings and sites, assessing how people with varying disabilities, mobility, vision, hearing and cognitive experience the built environment. The foundation has said that to date, over 2,200 sites have been successfully rated across Canada and internationally.
Colin Farnan of the Rick Hansen Foundation says that the certification for the T.C. Douglas Building means the building is “certified as a place for most disabilities will be able to visit and be able to get around the building.”
By being certified, the building “goes through a very long process and they're very diligent about working with all the different disabilities from mobility disabilities, near- divergent, special needs, and what works best with them for deaf, hard of hearing, low vision, blind. So, the certification looks at all those aspects of disabilities and figures out on a gap analysis report on what the building's doing well and what it needs work with.”
