Narrator: The city of Thorold with a population of 18,000 has made great strides to improve accessibility. When the city was looking for a new home for its municipal offices, Thorold incorporated accessibility into its plans at the outset.
Henry D'Angela: This is where the service counters are for the Finance department, for the Building department and the Clerks department. Again, everything is very accessible. There's low counters, there's the high counters, and there's lots of room to manoeuvre.
Even when we're looking at our new building codes and building standards - a façade improvement downtown, we want to make sure that there's no steps there, that it's accessible for everyone. So, in the design standards we have to incorporate the heritage but also the accessibility aspects that are also very, very important.
The washrooms are accessible, but this door here wasn't accessible when it was originally designed. So we added another one so that you can come to the door here. And then there's a male and a female washroom which is fully accessible.
Slide: Leanne was a driving force behind some of the accessibility changes at the city hall.