Accessibility audit

An accessibility audit is a survey of a building against a defined set of attributes, carried out on site and recorded as figures rather than impressions. A real audit measures: step count and riser height at the entrance, clear door widths with the door held at ninety degrees, lift car dimensions taken inside the cabin, the largest unobstructed turning circle, gradient along the steepest metre, surface type, accessible toilet layout and transfer space, hearing and sensory provision, and the step-free route in from the nearest station. Each figure carries the instrument used and the date it was taken.

The instruments matter as much as the checklist, because estimation is where audits quietly become opinion. A laser distance meter for widths and turning space, a digital inclinometer for gradients, and a tape for riser heights and grab rail positions produce numbers another person can repeat and disagree with. Photographs at the entrance, the lift, the toilet and any obstruction pin the findings to a moment. An audit that reports “adequate circulation space” rather than a figure cannot be checked, cannot be compared with another building, and cannot be used by an architect.

Who carries one out varies by country. Some markets have formal registers of access consultants, such as the National Register of Access Consultants in the UK, and larger organisations often use a chartered surveyor or an access consultant with a building-standards background. Disabled people’s organisations run audits too, frequently with better judgement about what actually stops a visit. The credential matters less than two things: whether the protocol is published, and whether the auditor was free to record an unwelcome finding.

A compliance audit and a usability audit are not the same exercise, and it is worth knowing which you are reading. A compliance audit tests a building against the local building code and equality legislation, which is a legal question with a legal answer. A usability audit tests what a traveller physically encounters, which sometimes sets a higher bar than the code and occasionally a different one. A venue can be fully compliant and still score modestly, usually because the accessible route exists but is awkward, indirect, or behind a door that needs two hands.

This distinction is why we label every profile on this site as either verified or compiled. A verified figure was measured on site by a trained verifier with an instrument, a photograph and a date. A compiled figure was transcribed from a venue’s own accessibility statement, an operator’s step-free data or a published floor plan, with its source and retrieval date recorded, and has not been confirmed on the ground. Almost the entire dataset is currently compiled, and each profile says so plainly rather than in a footnote.