Welcome to Disability Awareness Consultants

Hello. We are Disability Awareness Consultants, and we want to tell you about us. We’re excited to be here, and we love to share our stories! Let us help you increase the real diversity of your organization.

Why Is This Site Different From Others?

This site has been optimized to afford access to the widest range of Internet users by following today’s Best Practices and Standards, as set out by the World Wide Web Consortium(W3C) Guidelines for Web Accessibility 2.0. It was developed for us by Geof Collis of Badeyes Consulting, badeyes.com.

Who We Are:

A team of carefully coached and experienced trainers, who all live with different disabilities. We have been working together, providing quality programs since 1995. Since we began our program, more than 20,000 people have benefited from our training services. We were the first organization to use trainers with disabilities, and we’re still the only organization that employs teams of presenters who are all disabled.

What We Do:

Programs are offered in English and French, and are delivered by experienced trainers who live with physical, vision, speech, learning, intellectual, psychiatric, or neurological disabilities, facial differences, hearing loss, or chemical sensitivities. Our services are available throughout Canada, and we have delivered training or site audits from British Columbia to Newfoundland, and from Sault St. Marie to Florida.

Why We Do This Training:

We do this because we all live with disabilities and we want to explain how we live, and what you can and cannot do to help us. It’s our passion, as well as our mission.

What We Have to Offer:

• Informative and Professionally Managed Sessions
  *We provide a flexible training format that accommodates your schedule.
• *Take advantage of workshops from 1 to 15 hours, Lunch-N-Learn, keynote speeches, Train the Trainer, e-learning, or kiosks at an awareness program. The list is limited only by your imagination!
• * Choose a team from 7 experienced instructors who live with disabilities. Ensure an enriching experience with the assistance of our dynamic president, Lauri Sue Robertson.
• Training Created Exclusively for You
  * Take advantage of our customized training plan for workshops or speeches that meet the needs of your organization.
• Consultation Services to Develop Your Training Programs
  * Capitalize on our expertise when developing and implementing your own training programs.
• Policy Development with your Human Resources Department
  * We will help your staff write the employment policies for staff with disabilities, or we can give you a turn-key package, covering as many issues as you need.
• AODA Compliance Programs
  * We have trainers who were on various committees for standards development with the province. We are experts on the AODA, and will help you become experts too!

The Training Team

• Professional Trainers Who Live with Disabilities
  * An impact study, involving several hundred participants in our workshops, indicated that having instructors who had disabilities was key to the training’s success.
• Count on Competent, Experienced, Accredited Trainers
  * Our seven trainers receive support and supervision as well as specialized instruction to maximize effectiveness in adult education. Following every training session, each instructor receives a performance evaluation. Trainers’ skills
  and workshop content are subject to regular review and upgrading.
• A Diversity of Educational Backgrounds
  * Our trainers come from all walks of life and have a broad range of experiences as active members of the community. Some have university backgrounds in teaching.

What Our Trainers Say

Carole Robertson

I like to do training because it helps people to understand the challenges that blind people face. Training also gives me the opportunity to show everyone how to treat a person with disability as normally as possible.

Mary Daniel

Sam Savona

It gives me great satisfaction and pleasure when I see the participants have a change of attitude after going through our sensitivity training.

Phil Daniels

Lauri Robertson

Training is great fun. I really enjoy interacting with the participants in my workshops. Many people think they know all the things we’re going to tell them. I love to see the expressions of surprise on their faces when participants learn something they don’t expect.

I really enjoy making them laugh at some of the funny things that have happened to me over the years. One of my favourite sayings is: “I’m the least-shy person in the whole world, so you can ask me absolutely anything you want to know about disabilities. If I don’t know the answer, I’ll find out and get back to you.”