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, using a framework I built myself, 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. That is most of my clients.
It is probably not for you if you need a document to wave at a board and what it says does not much matter. I will write you a real report and you will not enjoy it.
The longer version, including who this is not for
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.
The other four, answered in full
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.
