Ideas For Making Your Home Accessible

Are you looking for ways to create an accessible space to live in? Perhaps you plan to build or renovate, or you need some tips and ideas to help you stay in the home you love? Accessibility is so much more than just grab bars in bathrooms! Whether you are creating a space that works for you, your client or your loved one, Build YOUR Space helps you make decisions that will allow for reduced physical energy needs, improved safety during everyday activities, increased independence and the preservation of dignity. Build YOUR Space "walks" you through the process of planning an accessible space, from a single bathroom to a whole home. You will learn how the big decisions, like windows and flooring can make as much of an impact as the small details of counter height and door handles. Build YOUR Space will help you customize your space to fit your personal requirements.For those who build, renovate and design new buildings, Julie will help you save time and money by doing it right the first time. Using her own home as an example, interviews from experts and further ideas from unconventional accessible spaces, Build YOUR Space highlights all the tips and tricks that you didn't know you needed to know. Julie Sawchuk is an Accessibility Strategist, certified by the Rick Hansen Foundation Accessibility Certification(R) program. As a published author and professional speaker, she combines her lived experience with her passion for helping people make smart decisions when planning for accessibility. Julie has helped plan the renovations of small century-old buildings on the mainstreet of her hometown, as well as the design of the newly constructed Blyth Cowbell Brewing Co. Two Canadian International Airports have become RHFAC certified with Julie's help and major Ontario cities have also come calling. Julie's home is a showcase of how accessibility is not just functional, but also beautiful.

Looks at all aspects of designing better houses and domestic spaces either external or internal that improve the lives of people with disabilities or lack of complete mobility.

Everyone involved in planning, design, construction, maintenance and owning/operating a building with a bathroom needs this book. Although it was written with public and commercial washroom designs in mind, the information also applies to residential spaces. No matter what kind of bathroom you are building, it's always easier to move a line on paper - before it is a permanent wall. Regardless of where you are in your construction, it's never too late to make improvements and build better bathrooms. People with disabilities are the largest minority group in the world. They have family, friends and colleagues that they shop, dine and travel with. Everyday millions of Canada consider accessibility when determining which business to visit. Whether it is a permanent or temporary disability, access to bathrooms will determine whether or not people choose to come to your restaurant, work at your business or use your recreation complex; they have the same needs as you. If people can't access your buildings and the washrooms, it will cost you their business.Building Better Bathrooms will guide you through design criteria for each primary accessible component of a bathroom. You will see what "better bathrooms" look like, how they measure up and, most importantly, you will learn why doing it right really matters.

Written by the best-selling author of Multiple Sclerosis: 300 Tips for Making Life Easier and Parkinson's Disease: 300 Tips for Making Life Easier, Home Accessibility will help people with chronic illness, physical disability, temporary or permanent, and

In this elegantly written inquiry into the function and purpose of illness, Duff reflects upon her own experience with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS) and offers a fresh perspective on recovery and healing. While we are conditioned to think of health as the norm, the author reveals that illness has its own geography, laws and commandments.

A history of design that is often overlooked—until we need it Have you ever hit the big blue button to activate automatic doors? Have you ever used an ergonomic kitchen tool? Have you ever used curb cuts to roll a stroller across an intersection? If you have, then you’ve benefited from accessible design—design for people with physical, sensory, and cognitive disabilities. These ubiquitous touchstones of modern life were once anything but. Disability advocates fought tirelessly to ensure that the needs of people with disabilities became a standard part of public design thinking. That fight took many forms worldwide, but in the United States it became a civil rights issue; activists used design to make an argument about the place of people with disabilities in public life. In the aftermath of World War II, with injured veterans returning home and the polio epidemic reaching the Oval Office, the needs of people with disabilities came forcibly into the public eye as they never had before. The US became the first country to enact federal accessibility laws, beginning with the Architectural Barriers Act in 1968 and continuing through the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, bringing about a wholesale rethinking of our built environment. This progression wasn’t straightforward or easy. Early legislation and design efforts were often haphazard or poorly implemented, with decidedly mixed results. Political resistance to accommodating the needs of people with disabilities was strong; so, too, was resistance among architectural and industrial designers, for whom accessible design wasn’t “real” design. Bess Williamson provides an extraordinary look at everyday design, marrying accessibility with aesthetic, to provide an insight into a world in which we are all active participants, but often passive onlookers. Richly detailed, with stories of politics and innovation, Williamson’s Accessible America takes us through this important history, showing how American ideas of individualism and rights came to shape the material world, often with unexpected consequences.