When Accessibility Means More Than Getting Through the Door

I came across a conference that I would have loved to have gone to, but I hit an accessibility barrier. It isn't the one you're expecting. This one is inaccessible to me because I'm a student, and even more than that, I'm a student with a mobility problem that keeps me out of work in the typical student jobs. In other words, like many other people with disabilities, and like many other students, I'm too poor to pay the registration fee.

The conference to which I'm referring, ironically, is the University of Guelph Accessibility Conference. The registration fee for students is $70+taxes, per day. It's only two days long, but that's still $140+taxes. The fee for non-students is $110+taxes for one day, or $200+taxes for both days. To provide some context, the University of Waterloo and Wilfrid Laurier University are currently hosting the 2012 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences. It runs for an entire week (plus a day) and the registration fee for students is $77 (for last minute registrations). Not per day, for the entire week. I understand that there is a difference in scale and budget for these conferences, but there's a huge gap between $9.62/day and $70/day. Both conferences might be outside the budget of the average student.

Students aren't the target audience of the Accessibility Conference, and neither, really, are people with disabilities, but what is the worth of a conference about accessibility if it isn't accessible to the people who require accessible spaces? How can you foster understanding when the majority of the people you're supposed to be understanding can't afford to attend? How can you learn about accessibility needs when your conference isn't accessible to the people you're talking about accommodating? One of their conference goals is to "De-emphasize the notion of disability by encouraging a universal design approach to the creation and dissemination of information." Thanks for achieving your own goal, folks. Another goal is to "Offer participants the opportunity to network, to share ideas and strategies, to learn how others approach and address accessibility issues, to gain practical information, etc." Would people with disabilities, people who tend to be on the poorer end of the spectrum because of barriers in the workplace, not be an invaluable resource in terms of achieving this goal?

The conference is a great idea, and it's good to see more attention being paid to accessibility, but it would have been great if the conference was financially accessible enough to allow people to go and speak for themselves.

I have provided the link to the conference homepage if anyone is interested/has the resources to attend. It runs from May 29-May 30, 2012 (short notice, I know)
http://www.accessconf.ca/default.aspx