A lifelong wheelchair user, Maayan Ziv understands that Toronto — and the world — isn’t built with accessibility top of mind.
“Accessibility is always a side conversation; it’s never really centre stage,” Ziv told The Green Line. She seeks to change that by creating spaces where accessibility is the main goal, rather than an afterthought.
On June 6, Ziv hosted AccessFest in David Pecaut Square in downtown Toronto, an accessible festival that centres inclusion and accommodation for people living with disabilities. Debuted in 2025, AccessFest brings Torontonians together through live music, workshops, talks and wellness activities. Ziv is also the founder and CEO of AccessNow, a crowdsourced platform that maps the accessibility status of restaurants, parks and transit facilities worldwide.
📸: Provided by Maayan Ziv.
Beyond AccessFest and AccessNow, Ziv is also a photographer specialized in portraits, editorial fashion and street photography.
While Ziv doesn’t think about disability all that much, she does think about access a lot, she told The Green Line. Read on to learn how she creates accessible spaces and communities in Toronto.
You’re something of a jack-of-all trades, at once a CEO, photographer, advocate and entrepreneur, among other roles. Imagine you’re at a dinner party and someone asks what you do. What do you say?
If I was at a dinner party, I’d probably say that I’m an activist and an entrepreneur. I really have a mission to create a more accessible world and I do that through a variety of ways, from advocacy to technology to entrepreneurship.
How did you first get involved in the disability advocacy space?
You know, when you’re born into any minority group or any kind of “diversity category,” you’re often faced with barriers or a lack of understanding around certain things in the world. For me, as a person with a disability and in order to go to the places that I want to go to and reach the opportunities that I want to seize, I have to be an advocate for myself, first and foremost, because people aren’t always educated or understanding of disability and the world itself is also not really designed or built with disability in mind.
I also made it a choice in that I wanted to advocate not just for myself, but for many others with disabilities.
Related to your advocacy work, I’m curious about AccessFest. Can you tell me more about the festival’s origins and the driving mission behind it?
As an entrepreneur, I’ve been in the tech and entrepreneurship space for about 12 years now and throughout my experience working in accessibility specifically, I’ve been in many different conversations, I’ve had the opportunity to travel around the world and speak on panels and keynotes and stages and festivals and conferences.
Often in these spaces, accessibility is a side conversation. Maybe it’s one conversation within a week-long conference or festival. But accessibility is never really centre stage. It’s not the driver of an experience. It’s not really giving people a chance to immerse themselves in the power and the transformation of accessibility.
📸: Provided by Maayan Ziv.
And so AccessFest creates a space that really centres accessibility and doesn’t just talk about it, but actually creates a world, for just one day, where you experience the benefits of the things that we advocate for every day. It’s a space for everyone to show up and feel that sense of inclusion and understand why accessibility is so important.
In juggling the several projects you work on at once, do you have a core phrase or mission that you return to, to ground yourself?
So AccessNow, which is the company that I founded 12 years ago, our mission is really to be the go-to resource for accessibility information. We started with an app that focuses on accessibility information for storefront, restaurants, parks, and transit facilities. And it’s really grown into being a source that people can look to, to understand, how do I be more accessible? How do I create more accessible employment opportunities? How do I learn about how to be an accessible advocate in the world?
It’s really just a starting place for accessibility. With that same mission, you know, AccessFest is really a space for celebrating, advocating and activating more accessibility and inclusion.
📸: Provided by Maayan Ziv.
What are some concrete things that Torontonians can do to help make our city more accessible?
I think the first thing is to open your exposure to different types of thinking and different creators and ideas. I always tell people, one of the easiest and simplest ways that you can start to learn about different accessibility components is by following disabled creators on social media. There are so many different people. If you’re interested in sports or fashion or beauty, there are disabled creators online sharing their stories and their perspectives.
It really helps to normalize what’s a part of life — which is disability — but we don’t always see it on TV or mainstream media, so getting access to the very real voices and personas that are leading in this space is a really easy way to start to familiarize yourself with the language and the culture.
And then I would say, show up at AccessFest. Every year we’ll be here, it’s a free festival. We invite everyone to show up and be part of that with us.
This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.
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