Shaping the accessibility plan from the inside
By Christianna Scott, Director, Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Employee Accessibility at Air Canada.
I measure our progress by the way a room sounds when people feel safe to tell the truth. The first time that happened, someone said: “This is the first time I’ve been asked what I need.” The air changed. We moved from polite to precise, from issues to systems. What we heard wasn’t a list of complaints but rather it was a map of where guidance went quiet, tools broke flow and handoffs didn’t hold. That map became the backbone of how employees helped shape Air Canada’s Accessibility Plan.
Employees across the operation, including airport teams, tech ops, cabin crew and corporate, named barriers and also the bright spots where consistency already lived. Those stories gave us direction. We learned that accessibility couldn’t sit in a single policy or a single team; it had to be the way we design every decision. And it had to be clear enough that people didn’t need a workaround to do the right thing.
Our Accessibility Advisory Committee helped keep us honest. The members challenged our assumptions and kept lived experience at the centre so priorities reflected reality, not wishful thinking. What landed for me was the shift from “adding accessibility” to “revealing what was missing.” When you stop treating accessibility as an add‑on, you start seeing how it threads through safety, service and culture.
Hans Dupuis, DE&I Support Administrator at Air Canada, pointed to a moment in a process where the instructions stopped being human, and it helped us rewrite the guidance so it felt clear, respectful and doable under pressure. For his part, Hans said, “It helped me and reduced the stress related to my daily challenges as an autistic person.”
We asked, “What gets in your way?” Michael Fitzmorris, Air Canada’s Managing Director of Engineering, Airframe Maintenance and Powerplants, helped us turn our employees’ candour into design, getting the ball rolling on real fixes: “Once I shared my disability and mobility challenges with my peers and leaders, there was understanding and efforts made to assist me and make accommodations when possible.”
What came next was straightforward, if not simple: capture the pain points, trace the ripple effects across roles and rebuild the steps so dignity shows up in the outcome. We weren’t building something on top of our work; we were repairing what people rely on every day. That’s the tone I carry forward: humble about what we still need to do, direct about what we can change now and accountable for the difference people actually feel in their shift. This plan isn’t a finish line; it’s the way we work now: practical, specific and grounded in lived experience.
More soon.