Public parks are often treated as either “accessible” or “not accessible,” yet community members experience access as uneven, incremental, and shaped by local capacity, terrain, maintenance, and design tradeoffs across disability needs. As communities navigate change together, parks function as shared infrastructure where equity goals meet real constraints, and where cross-sector partnerships determine whether inclusion becomes durable or merely symbolic. Our paper develops a typology for grading park accessibility on a spectrum, translating accessibility from a compliance frame into a practical community development tool for assessment, prioritization, and accountability.
Building on prior research on disability access initiatives in public parks, the typology organizes accessibility into key domains that reflect both the built environment and institutional practice: arrival and entry (parking, connections, gates), mobility and navigation (routes, surfaces, slopes), facilities and amenities (restrooms, seating, shade, play features), communication and wayfinding (signage, maps, sensory information), and programmatic inclusion (adaptive programming, staff capacity, policies, and partnerships). Rather than producing a single designation, our framework assigns parks to graded tiers along an accessibility continuum, distinguishing minimal compliance from meaningful inclusion. The typology also incorporates an equity context layer, recognizing that rurality, fiscal constraints, and maintenance volatility can erode accessibility over time even when infrastructure exists.
