F E AT U R E
Auditing Accessibility The City of London Corporation have been looking, as part of their 25-year Transport Strategy, to define an accessible street, identify and resolve conflicts between different street users, and create an audit tool, the City of London Street Accessibility Tool (CoLSAT). The Tool’s creator explains the approach. Ross Atkin
Trying to improve the accessibility of our streets is not a new idea. British street designers have been installing dropped kerbs since at least the 1930s, and tactile paving since the early 1990s. The Disability Discrimination Act (DDA, subsequently replaced by The
Mobility Impairment
Equality Act 2010) was passed in 1995 and made street accessibility a legal obligation in 2005. It is perhaps a surprise then that what an ‘accessible street’ actually looks like remains highly contested, with organisations representing disabled people often highlighting serious issues with both individual schemes and widely deployed design features. Back in 2005, when the DDA came into force, I was working for a street furniture company trying to design a compliant range of products. I became very frustrated with
Sensory Impairment
the rather abstract guidance that was available, as it contained no explanation of the user needs that should be met; there was no sense of the lived experiences of actual disabled people. A few years later, I jumped at the chance to collect this lived experience first-hand, working with The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and the Royal College of Art Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design on a research project focused on shadowing blind and partially sighted people on journeys on UK streets. I have worked on six similar
Neurodiversity
Electric wheelchair user
Long cane user
Acquired neurological impairment
Manual wheelchair user
Guide dog user
Autism/Sensory -processing diversity
Mobility scooter user
Residual sight user
Developmental impairment
Walking aid user
Deaf, deaf or hard of hearing
Person with walking difficulties 1.
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1. There are 13.9 million disabled people in the UK and every one of them has slightly different needs and preferences. The toolkit tried to cover this diversity by using 12 needs segments which capture the most significant differences in how disabled people interact with streets.
