Last month, Oregon became the first state in the nation to be verified for its accessibility for travelers with disabilities by the travel website Wheel the World. The company worked with Travel Oregon to assess hundreds of hotels, restaurants, tourism providers and state parks in seven regions across the state for their accessibility. That includes features like step-free entrances at museums or specialized wheelchairs available to venture onto a beach on the Oregon Coast.
But the state’s efforts to promote its accessibility doesn’t mean that barriers don’t still exist for travelers with physical or neurocognitive disabilities. Small hotel owners and tourism operators may also lack awareness about best practices to engage with these travelers or struggle with how to become more accessible online and in person.
To address these gaps, researchers at Southern Oregon University recently received a grant from Travel Oregon to develop and roll out training workshops at 12 locations across the state for travel industry professionals and other stakeholders. The training includes guidance on best practices and role-playing exercises where participants can experience, for example, what it’s like to navigate a carpeted hotel lobby in a wheelchair or to communicate information to a person who is hard of hearing during an emergency.
The goal of these trainings and the education they provide is to create a statewide network of “Accessible Tourism Ambassadors,” according to Pavlina McGrady, an associate professor in the school of business at Southern Oregon University. McGrady and Rebecca Williams, an assistant professor in the school of business at SOU, join us for more details. Ulysses McCready, a junior at SOU who is blind, also shares his perspective about inclusive tourism and the assistance he provided McGrady and Williams on their project.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: From the Gert Boyle Studio at OPB, this is Think Out Loud. I’m Dave Miller. Oregon can be a good place for people with disabilities to travel – that’s according to an inclusive travel company that verified hundreds of restaurants, hotels and other places across the state for their accessibility. But there is still a lot of opportunity to expand accessibility within the state.
Researchers at Southern Oregon University are working to do that right now. They got a grant from Travel Oregon to develop an accessibility training program for tourism business leaders across the state. Pavlina McGrady and Rebecca Williams are co-leading the project. They are business professors at SOU. Ulysses McCready is a student with blindness at SOU who has been consulting on the project. They all join me now. It’s great to have all three of you on the show.
Rebecca Williams: Thank you for having us.
Pavlina McGrady: Thanks for having us.
Miller: Pavlina, first – the grant you got from Travel Oregon this year and a related one last year, they’re for boosting accessible tourism in the state. How do you define accessible tourism?
McGrady: What is accessible tourism? Part of the problem is that a lot of people have kind of open concept and very different interpretation. But in simple terms, it can be just the ongoing endeavor of tourist destinations or businesses to offer products, services, different activities that are accessible to all people. That means regardless of their physical limitations, disabilities or even age, again, that can relate not only for people with disabilities but also for younger children, older adults and so forth.
So making destinations and tourism, business activities and services available to everybody, in simple terms.
Miller: Rebecca, it seems like one of the challenges here is the broadness of what could be included here, because given that there’s just such a huge spectrum of disabilities and human abilities, what’s accessible for one person may not be accessible for somebody else. How does that complicate the work you’re trying to do?
Williams: I think a lot of the world has been designed for able bodies. And what we are trying to help people understand is that if you create it in a universal design format, then it is open to anybody to be able to access. So we can start from that framework. And then look throughout our businesses and assess what are the things that we need to redesign. Or [it] could be mild, simple improvements, a little bit of our time, versus resources, money and millions of dollars, which is where a lot of people’s brains frantically go to.
Miller: Is it fair to say, Rebecca – I understand that you’re a wheelchair user yourself – that this is both an academic question for you and a personal one?
Williams: It is. I was injured by an intoxicated individual on 4th of July in 2022 in Brookings, Oregon. And I am now a full-time wheelchair user.
Miller: Can you give us a sense for the accessibility issues that you’ve encountered as you’ve traveled around, as you’ve engaged with tourism businesses in recent years?
Williams: Since being able to get some abilities back, because I’d spent a good number of years doing recovery work … So anything from their interpretation of what an accessible room is or what height of toilet levels, bedroom height, the actual sleeping height of the mattress is, a desk that I couldn’t get under because they assumed it would be accessible for anyone. And I’m in a simple pushchair. So this doesn’t even count the other hundreds of different kinds of chairs that are available to other kinds of users as well.
So yeah, it’s just been phenomenal. One of the restrooms that I was in, it was supposed to be a zero-entry shower. It was quite a large shower, and they had the accessible bench on one end all the way over, and 7 feet on the other side was the controls for it. So I couldn’t access it or take a shower. It just gets really demeaning, I think, in a lot of ways, that I’m not able to access things that I would like to use.
Miller: In a case like that, do you say anything? I’m wondering if …
Williams: I’m very vocal! Yes, I do.
Miller: You are?
Williams: I approach managers and share with them not only my experience but also the accessibility consulting work that we do in educating. And I share with them those kinds of things. In the same hotel, the breakfast buffet was a very narrow place for a body to walk sideways through, like a buffet would be, but there was no room for me in a chair to go through it. So I had to find someone to help me and get me breakfast. There were a number of things.
I think everyone is on a journey for accessibility and whatever stage that they’re at, there’s probably something in the quality improvement realm that there’s something everybody can do.
Miller: Pavlina, you used an earlier grant from Travel Oregon to do surveys and focus groups of a bunch of tourism businesses in Southern Oregon. What kinds of themes stood out? What did you hear from these businesses about what they’re doing and what they want?
McGrady: Yes, we conducted research. We did in-person surveys. We did in-person assessments where we had a checklist to check kind of where businesses were in terms of the infrastructure. And then after that, we had focus groups to get deeper understanding, and then stakeholder meetings after that to share findings and kind of gather last pieces of information.
The main kind of findings from that study were that, well, one, there are a lot of accessibility challenges. The main challenges that businesses experienced were, obviously beyond financial issues … because most of them are small businesses. Just the main quote kind of that stood out for us, we don’t know what we don’t know. There are so many different types of disabilities, and we found that none of the businesses we surveyed had a specific training for their staff to go beyond general hospitality. But to go into kind of accessibility, maybe learning how to work with people with disabilities, how to be welcoming, etc.
So the number one probably was the lack of information. Everybody shared that they are really willing to learn and want to know more, just don’t know where to look, how to access it and so forth. People were interested in having different types of information formats and then having some kind of resource hub where they can access information on different providers, trainings, grants and so forth on accessibility. So that was kind of the major finding that just there’s not enough information.
Miller: And that’s what you’re working on now, your team, is to provide those trainings to businesses in a number of places. Ulysses, how did you get involved in this project?
Ulysses McCready: Yeah, so I met Rebecca just as an accident, over the summer. We sat together at an event and started talking about our similar experiences. She heard what I had to say and reached out to ask me whether I would like to just be involved in the training a little bit and share my experience. So I did. And it was a very gratifying, enjoyable experience because accessibility is something I’m extremely passionate about discussing with folks on a personal level, on an academic level, across the board. Because it is vital to people and it changes people’s lives.
And especially in the context of experiences of travel and tourism, like I have been on so many trips that taught me things that I have carried with me or given me experiences that have changed my outlook on the world. So I just was happy to talk about some of those things and share my insight with people who may have never interacted with a blind person before, kind of across the board.
So I helped to film a video and just kind of gave a little bit of background about myself, and it was a very positive experience. And I hope to do more if other opportunities come from that. I told Rebecca, I was like, if there are more spaces for me to get involved with this project, I’m totally there, because grants like this are few and far between. And I think it’s amazing what they’re doing.
Miller: What would you say to business owners who think that the efforts that they may make to make their businesses more accessible, that they’ll be too costly or too difficult?
McCready: This is a very good question and one that I generally answer in a similar way every time. For me, access benefits everybody. People have a wide variety of needs, even when they share similar conditions. Everyone’s need is different. And that’s worth considering, but it’s also worth considering how taking measures to increase access helps everybody.
There’s a phenomenon known as the curb cut effect, which highlights how the curb cut was created and invented to benefit folks who use wheelchairs. And that kind of expanded outward to help everyone. It helps blind people align themselves to cross streets safely. It helps people with strollers, shopping carts and similar things. I think that principle applies across the board, where you may have a business or an institution saying something along the lines of, this is too much work, this is too much effort, and they don’t pause to consider how much their effort will impact not only the people who it helps just gain access in the first place, but people who already have access.
Miller: Rebecca, what do you see as some, I don’t know, low-hanging fruit that tourism operators or business owners could think about, things that they could do, and I’m thinking in particular that don’t cost a lot of money? If we’re talking, say, about small businesses that don’t have a lot of money and if we’re not talking about federal law, the Americans with Disabilities Act, but doing more, what are some things that you’re training people to think about?
Williams: We found that a number of the small businesses, if they have a website – and keep in mind many don’t – that one of the first things they can do is to have an accessibility tab that allows individuals to gain insight about what is available at their site, and also even possibly what isn’t, just to let people know what they can do for them, how they’ve served people in the past, potential examples if they wanted to share that, or even loyalty comments from clients that they have served.
And then pictures, letting people know what their access looks like. So here are the front doors that you can enter. We have a push button, or if you let us know that you’re coming on a certain day, we’ll make sure that we can open it for you if we don’t have a push button. Just general kinds of setups along those lines. And then a lot of the transitions in where people are heading to, which are the like, oh we’d love to have all these sensory exhibits and those kinds of things, is even being able to provide descriptions for people about what those existing things that they have are – whether it’s artwork that’s in a hotel, descriptions about what that artwork looks like, whether it’s audio, braille or things like that for people to be able to understand what their surroundings look like.
Something even as simple as a customer service angle as someone coming in and saying, “this is what our front room looks like, let me describe it for you for a moment,” if they’re unable to see it visually. There’s some very simple things that they can do to help increase and share what they’re able to do for individuals.
Miller: Pavlina, how will you know that your trainings are working, that they’re leading to change?
McGrady: Yeah, we have participants who have RSVP’d for the training complete a survey to kind of ask them what is their knowledge on accessibility and accessible tourism prior to the training, what are some of the topics they’re interested in, etc. And then we also asked them to complete a quick post-training survey where we asked them to see, to share if their knowledge had kind of increased and also to get feedback, obviously what they like and didn’t like about the training.
So that will be the simple way to see if they feel like they learned from the training. And then we also have a workbook where we ask them to participate in different activities and one of them is to develop some strategies short term and long term. Again, some of them [are] simple, just adding information to the website and things like that, while others more long term that maybe require funding.
We’ll try to follow up with some of those businesses and organizations. But the most kind of tangible way will be to analyze our survey results at the end of the whole project. We do that after every training to see how they feel. Did they learn from it? Were they happy with the training? And then, hopefully, we see more change happening for accessibility.
Miller: Pavlina McGrady and Rebecca Williams are business professors at Southern Oregon University. They are leading a training effort right now to make tourism more accessible in Oregon. Ulysses McCready consulted on the project. He is a student with blindness at SOU.
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