Overcoming barriers to participation

Tania Nadarajah is a Paralympic archer who competed for Great Britain from 2014 until her retirement from international sport in 2021. She now works in marketing and communications for Disability Assist, as well as staying involved in sport through the British Paralympic Association Athletes’ Commission and the Every Body Moves Lived Experience Advisory Board. She is also on the board of the charity, Sportability, which provides sporting events for people with paralysis, and is passionate about making sport accessible to all.

Low levels of physical activity are one of the biggest public health challenges faced by the UK. It causes an estimated 37,000 premature deaths annually and costs the UK economy around £20 billion per year.

Many people with a disability face greater challenges when trying to get active. The Activity Alliance Annual Disability and Activity Survey 2022 found that only 4 in 10 disabled people feel they can be as active as they want, in contrast to 7 in 10 non-disabled people.

Without the information on whether venues are capable of delivering activities that meet disabled people’s needs, it leaves the onus on them to seek out the relevant details, making what are meant to be easy decisions an arduous task.

“I was shocked at how difficult it was to do something new because of the additional information I needed to know in advance to decide if it was right for me. And that included the sporting and physical activity I wanted to get involved with. Something like joining a gym suddenly involved so much more research on my part.”

OpenActive can address these challenges by helping providers publish standardised open data on their activities, which can then be fed into third-party platforms. This gives people with disabilities the opportunity to search for and book suitable activities online. Making the process as straightforward as possible takes away some of the barriers to participation and will hopefully encourage more disabled people to become involved in physical activity.

One such third-party platform is Every Body Moves, developed by ParalympicsGB in partnership with Toyota, which uses OpenActive data to find and collate accessible activities. Every Body Moves aims to provide in-depth listings and all the information needed to connect people with a disability with local inclusive opportunities, informing and inspiring people to discover something new.

• The Every Body Moves website averages 18,500 views per month
• 7,500 average activity searches per month.
• 7000+ inclusive opportunities across the UK

As Tania says: “For these projects to be a success, providers need to get involved and be proactive in promoting their activities to disabled people. The utopia would be when activities are designed to be as inclusive as possible from the start and that becomes the norm of how sport and activities operate from creation through to delivery.”