April 2025

Palliative care aims to improve the quality of life for patients with life-limiting conditions, and their caregivers.

By testing the cognitive accessibility of palliative care resources, our work with Lakehead University, with financial contribution from Health Canada, aims to promote equitable access to palliative care services by persons with cognitive disabilities by leveraging the lived experience of our Accessibility Advisors.

The Sinclair Cancer Research Institute at Queen’s University combats cancer through cutting-edge research, innovative facilities, and the development of new treatments that offer hope to cancer patients.

Under Dr. Alyson Mahar, the institute called on Open to help develop cognitively accessible knowledge mobilization products based on their groundbreaking research. We rapidly transformed very complex and technical medical language into comprehensible communications materials, easily understood by anyone, without losing the essence of the content.

Traditionally, Bank of Canada has made payments accessible by supplying bank notes to Canadians. To inform the development of new policies, they needed to understand accessibility requirements for electronic and digital payment methods.

Smart Citizens Enabling Resilient Neighbourhoods (SCERN) is a research project aimed at developing digital social tools and platforms to help municipalities understand how differences in neighbourhood environments affect community resilience.

To support their mission of maximum inclusivity, Open worked with the Health Equity Systems Interventions (HESI) Research Group at Wilfred Laurier University’s Centre for Community Research, Learning and Action to support the implementation of accessibility principles, and facilitated the testing of a mobile application by neurodivergent individuals to identify cognitive accessibility improvements.