Combined Properties Springs to Adopt New Accessible Icon

Each year, spring means beautifully budding trees, blossoming flowers, comfortable temperatures, and a welcome end to what most would consider a winter that was too long. For Combined Properties, spring also marks the season to beautify our properties’ grounds. Along with mulching, trimming, weeding, and planting, we also pave and line our parking lots to ensure that they complement the freshness that nature brings this season.

This spring, it’s business as usual as we spruce up our properties – in all ways but one. This month when we line our parking lots, we’ll be replacing the existing handicap parking symbols with a new and improved accessible icon. The new icon is transforming the International Symbol for Access, portraying a person who is active and moving forward, taking the place of a more stagnant figure who seems constrained to the restraints of the wheelchair.

The updated icon was designed in 2010 by local artists Sara Hendren and Brian Glenney to provoke conversation about what it means to have a disability and how symbols can influence our language. When Hendren, a mother to a child with disabilities, looked at the original symbol, she saw a robotic figure overshadowed by the chair. The new design places the emphasis on the person and his or her forward movement and ability.

In 2012, Triangle, a Malden-based non-profit organization empowering people with disabilities, partnered with these local artists and launched the Accessible Icon Project. The project provides supplies, services, and resources to transform the International Symbol of Access into an active, engaged image.

Jeff Gentry, community relations director at Triangle and co-director of the Accessible Icon Project, hopes that the project will continue to spark public attention. “Our core goal is to stimulate conversation about how we view people with disabilities,” said Gentry. “The person in the new image isn’t waiting to be pushed; they’re actively pursuing their life goals.”

Triangle has ensured that the new image is compliant with the American Disabilities Act and is collaborating with the Massachusetts Office on Disability and other state agencies to promote a continually widening use and embracement of the image.

John Pereira, president of Combined Properties, also serves as the president of Triangle’s Board of Directors. “Triangle’s mission is to educate and guide others to recognize that we are all people with ability,” said Pereira. “Individuals who are using wheelchairs are not passive or powerless; they’re active, capable, and engaged. They’re out competing in marathons.”

Combined Properties joins other organizations and communities that are already using the new icon including Talbots, Clarks Companies, Goodwin Procter, Gordon College, Salem State, Worchester Polytech, Malden High School, Mystic Valley Regional Charter School, the City of Malden, and New York City.

And recently the reach has spread much farther. “A hospital chain in India just adopted the symbol!” said Gentry. “It’s becoming viral.”

Are you the next to adopt the new accessible icon? Watch this brief video produced by Triangle’s Ablevision to learn more or visit the project’s website here: www.accessibleicon.org.

Watch for photos of the new symbol at our properties – Coming Soon!