Most access audits stop at the ramp
There are six sides to access: Physical, Visual, Auditory, Cognitive, Emotional and Cultural. Most organisations have thought hard about the first one and barely at all about the other five. That is not a failing, it is what the sector trained everyone to do.
I assess all six, across the whole journey someone takes to reach you rather than room by room. You get named fixes instead of "improve signage", tiered so you can act at any budget, with the free ones listed first.
I am a wheelchair user and profoundly deaf, so the barriers get found in real time rather than theorised.
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The six domains
What each one actually asks
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01
Physical
Can you navigate with dignity, and without spending energy you needed for something else?
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02
Visual
Can you see what you need to see, or feel or hear it if you cannot?
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03
Auditory
Can you hear and be heard, especially in an emergency?
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04
Cognitive
Can you navigate without exhausting your mental bandwidth?
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05
Emotional
Do you feel like a guest, or a problem to be managed?
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06
Cultural
Does this space feel designed for you, or despite you?
Why one domain is never enough
The domains compound. Fix the Physical and ignore the Visual, and a wheelchair user with low vision still cannot get around on their own. Excel at Cultural and fail at Auditory, and Deaf staff feel welcomed by your values and excluded by your fire alarm.
The interesting failures are almost always intersections. Heavy doors are a physical cost. Harsh lighting is a sensory cost. Put them in the same corridor and a neurodivergent wheelchair user meets something neither measurement would have predicted on its own.
A building can meet every regulation in force and still make it clear you were not expected.
That is also why a single-disability lens fails. A building designed only around wheelchairs can be actively hostile to someone autistic. A building designed only around screen readers can be unusable for someone with a tremor. Six domains exist because people are not one thing.
It is also why I walk a building the way a disabled person arrives at it, rather than the way a facilities plan is organised. A checklist that assesses four barriers in isolation passes all four and misses the exclusion completely. Auditing in journey order is what lets me see it the way the person carries it, as a single running total.
The method in full, including how findings get scored and priced
Is this you?
Most people who get in touch open by apologising for not knowing the right words. You do not need the right words. Naming things clearly is my job, not yours.
This is probably for you if:
- You are already trying, and you know it is not enough. You have done some work, you care, and you just cannot see what you are missing. This is most of my clients.
- You have had specific feedback and it landed harder than you expected.
- You are about to spend real money on a refurbishment, a rebuild or a new website, and you want to get it right before rather than fix it after.
- You are already good and you want to be excellent. These are the most interesting jobs.
This is probably not for you if:
- You need a document to wave at a funder or a board, and what it says does not much matter. I will write you a real report and you will not enjoy it.
- You are buying on lowest cost. There is always someone cheaper, and the market is full of automated scans sold as audits.
- You want to be told you are fine. Sometimes you are. Often you are not, and I will say so, warmly and with the fixes attached, but I will say so.
I am not here to catch you out. The organisations that call me are the ones that care, which is why they are worried in the first place. The ones who should be worried rarely ring.
The things people worry about
These come up almost every time. None of them is silly.
We cannot afford it
Usually this means you do not know what it costs or what it returns. Every price is published, from £50 upward. Small arts organisations, CICs and disabled individuals pay what they can, with no justification asked. And every report puts the free fixes at the front, because there are always more of those than anyone expects.
Our building is old, or listed
Usually this means somebody told you it was too hard. Listed status constrains what you can change to the fabric. It constrains almost nothing about lighting, signage, acoustics, staff practice, your website, your booking process or how somebody is greeted at the door. Most of what I find in a heritage building is not structural.
We have already had an audit
Usually this means you paid for one and nothing changed. That is the commonest story in this sector and it is a failure of the report, not of you. If a report gives you a hundred findings and no order, no costs and no way to start, of course nothing happened. That is why every finding here comes with three costed options and a priority.
We do our best
I know. Underneath this one is usually a worry that you are about to be told you have been harming people without realising.
Here is the honest answer: you probably have been, in small ways, and so has nearly every organisation in the country, because the entire sector was trained to look at one thing out of six. That is not a moral failure. It is a design problem, and design problems have fixes.
Our accessibility scan came back green
A site can pass every automated check and still be hostile. Every image has alt text, and all of it says "image". The site is fully keyboard operable, and the focus indicator is a one-pixel dotted outline nobody can see. The booking form is perfectly labelled, and the only way to book a wheelchair space is to ring a phone number.
That is a score of 3 or 4 out of 10. Technically accessible, emotionally excluding. Automated tooling catches a minority of WCAG failures and detects precisely nothing in the Emotional and Cultural domains.
A funder is paying. Do we get the report?
The report goes to the organisation it is about. If a funder or a commissioning body is paying, that is fine, and the contract still names the venue's right to receive the report and to talk to me about it afterwards. This is a term rather than a hope: seven audits have been commissioned through funders and not one reached the organisation it was written about.
Can I phone you?
No. I am profoundly deaf, and a phone conversation is not something I can do accurately, so you would not get a good service from one.
Video with live captions works, on Zoom, Teams, Meet or whatever you already use. If video does not suit you, we do it in writing instead and you get the same thing. Some people much prefer this, and it makes a better record.
More on who this is for, and who it is not for
Start with a conversation
The first twenty minutes are free, and they are genuinely useful on their own. No preparation, no documents, no tour. You describe your space, your service or the thing that is bothering you, and I ask the questions that surface what has not been looked at.
Plenty of people get what they needed in that twenty minutes and go away and do it themselves. That is a good outcome and I would rather that happened than sell you something you did not need.
Writing
Understanding Digital Accessibility for ADHD
International Week of the Deaf: How to Make Sure Your Business is Accessible to the Deaf Community
What Is a Podcast Transcript and Why Is It Important?
Quick and Easy Ways to Make Your Office Space More Accessible for Everyone
Accessibility Tips for Retail and Hospitality
Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD)
Website Accessibility – Deep Dive!