A briefing paper on the state of the art of accessibility research focusing on disabled people, including research on attitudinal accessibility and attitudinal barriers

Disabled people face many accessibility problems in their lived reality as evident by the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD). Many societal developments and discussions can influence accessibility and be influenced by accessibility. The objective of this briefing paper for the members of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Insight grant, 435-2024-0750; Computational Urban Accessibility: Understanding, Mapping, and Scoring Barriers in the Built Environment was to better understand the academic coverage of accessibility-related to disabled people, with a particular focus on attitudinal accessibility and attitudinal barriers. We performed a scoping review of abstracts from Scopus, Web of Science, and the 70 databases accessible through EBSCO-HOST using manifest coding and thematic content analysis approaches to fulfill the objective. Our analysis generated various insights: for instance, of the 526,556 abstracts that contained the term “accessibility” only 6.9% also included the disability terms we used. For some other accessibility related terms, the % was even lower. The term “attitudinal accessibility” was only found in 48 full texts, of which 16 had content related to disabled people. Healthcare was the main topic mentioned under attitudinal barriers. Words and phrases such as health, healthcare, “public health”, rehabilitation and “health services” were mentioned substantially, others such as intersectionality, health promotion, “social determinants of health”, health equity, science and technology governance terms and others reflecting various social discussions were rarely mentioned. International normative legal documents were rarely mentioned or not at all. Our findings highlight significant opportunities to engage more deeply with multifaceted accessibility issues affecting disabled people, including the use of occupational rights-based, ability judgment-based, intersectionality-based and spatial rights-based concepts as analytical tools. Such efforts are essential for advancing social inclusion, health and wellbeing and equity of disabled people.