Partners: Allen Cheadle: (Investigator, U.W. Department of Health Services); Diane Weldert (Spokane Health Improvement Partnership) Sandra Ciske and David Solet (Public Health, Seattle and King County); Richard Hoskins: (Washington State Department of Health)

Although disability results from the interaction between a person’s capacities and the demands of his or her environment, there are few measures of environmental barriers and enablers affecting people with disabilities. This project will develop, test, and disseminate community level indicators that identify and assess important community characteristics and processes affecting accessibility for adults and youth with disabilities. The outcome is a set of observational and routinely collected measures that give an ecological profile reflecting the accessibility of important domains of a community or neighborhood: just how physically and socially accessible are (e.g.) public transportation, schools, retail shopping, public buildings, churches, community organizations? The profile will guide local public health, independent living centers and other groups in deciding where to intervene to have the greatest impact on the accessibility of a community.