This year the Accessibility Week took place for the second time and lasted from June 1 to June 15 2014. The peculiarity of this year’s event was that activities took place not only in Minsk but also in other cities of Belarus: Grodno, Kobrin, Zhitkovichi, Lida, Smorgon, Baran, Bobruisk.
14 events were held during the Week they were organized as by the Office for the rights of persons with disabilities so by other organizations which support and share the ideas and values of the initiative. Some events took place before the official opening of the Accessibility Week 2014 and some are still ahead.
The key event – Accessibility Forum was very vivid and diverse. Nine projects in different spheres were presented at the Forum concerning architectural, informational, labour and other types of accessibility. Representatives of international charitable association “Children. Autism. Parents”, Association of lifelong learning and enlightenment, PA “Belarusian association of assistance for children and young people with disabilities”, NGO “Special world”, Grodno branches of the Red Cross, Office for the rights of persons with disabilities, “ArtIdea”, initiative “Internet – without barriers!” and also Latvian organization of people with disabilities and their friends APEIRONS presented to guests of the Forum their ideas and their practical realization.
About two dozen organizations joined the Accessibility Week this year. Besides the above mentioned it is also important to mention regional branches of PA ““Belarusian association of assistance for children and young people with disabilities” in Baran, Kobrin, Zhitkovichi, PA “RAIK in Lida, “Belarusian society of deaf people”, HR defence center “Spring”, initiative “Alternative youth platform, “Anti-movie”, “Socio”, “Uruch’e”, Mova Nanova”, “Lawtrend”, Farmstead Shabli”, Russian project “Metro for all”.
Accessibility Week was supported by the Republican collegium of advocates: all over the country and in Minsk free legal consultations for people with disabilities and parents of kids with special needs were held.
The coordinator of the Office for the rights of persons with disabilities Sergey Drozdovsky pays attention to the fact that this year specialists talked about new for the country topics – for example, universal design and inclusion in informal education. Besides, it is important to mention that this year the Accessibility Week included serious enough discussion on state politics in the sphere of disability.
- The second Accessibility Week differs organizationally: different sites for holding the events, different organizers and it lasted longer. Such format seems to us more interesting and successful but it is not the main thing. The main thing is the essence of the Week – says the director of the Office for the rights of persons with disabilities Enira Bronitskaya: - We are talking about different accessibility issues for the second year and of course we think about people with disabilities. But the second year in a row we show that many questions we raise concern every person and all the society. We want that the Accessibility Week’s events would be interesting for the wide audience but not only to specialists. It seems to us that this year we managed to attract more people than the last year and we hope we can do much better the next year. Another positive moment this year is the number of organizations that joined us. This is what we are trying to achieve. Office for the rights of persons with disabilities is just the initiator but anyone sharing the idea of the Accessibility Week can hold his event in the frames of the Accessibility Week. Already today we invite people to join Accessibility Week 2015 which is preliminary scheduled to the end of April 2015.
More than 400 people visited the events of the Accessibility Week 2014.