The General Opinion on Accessibility - Research About the Attitudes in Finland

The public discussion about accessibility in the built environment has been recently very ambivalent in Finland. Finnish Government programme includes 26 key projects and one of them links with deregulation of building legislation. In addition to this, according to the preliminary media analysis carried out by The Finnish Association of People with Physical Disabilities (FPD) the traditional media in Finland seems to give somewhat more support to those opposing accessibility than those supporting it. FPD wanted to find out people's attitudes towards accessibility and the possible disadvantages they see in promoting accessibility. The purpose was to get background information to influence on attitudes and to launch a positive attitude campaign. FPD commissioned a survey about the accessibility in built environment and find out that surprisingly, based on the survey, the opinions of the majority of people are not as negative as expected.