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

Ross Atkin is an independent designer and researcher based in London. He has a longstanding interest in the accessibility of the public realm and works on both research and design projects in this area for highway authorities, charities and manufacturers of streetscape products.

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 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 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 projects over the last twelve years, for government agencies, disability charities and highway authorities, following people with a wide range of impairments on journeys, documenting their experiences and feeding these back in ways I hoped were helpful to people making street design decisions.

Each of these projects created a rich and informative body of insights and experience, but I realised that there were two major limitations to the approach I was taking.

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.

Firstly, arranging these insights in a long report full of quotes (or even a web-based ‘insight bank’ with video clips) was not particularly helpful to the intended end user – the person who is actually designing and does not have time to read through a 50 page report every time they have a question about accessibility.

Secondly, by looking at how people with different impairments and mobility strategies experienced the same streets, it became clear that the needs of different groups of disabled people could sometimes be contradictory; improving accessibility for one group could make it worse for another. This meant that the ideal ‘accessible street’ was not straightforward to define.

This level crossing area provides advantages for this electric wheelchair user but could disadvantage the long cane user. Conversely the tactile paving deployed provides an advantage for the long cane user but can cause discomfort to the electric wheelchair user.

It turned out that The City of London Corporation had been grappling with some similar questions and were 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).

In order to ensure as complete a representation of the disabled community as possible within the limitations of the consultation, we identified 12 segments with a distinctive set of needs with respect to street design.

In partnership with Urban Movement, I was appointed to undertake this work. We realised that it would be the audit tool that end users would be using, so we worked out its mechanics, and then worked backwards to design the research methodology that would collect the views and experiences of disabled people necessary to make it work.

Conceptually, we started by acknowledging that, for many disabled people, accessibility and exclusion is not a binary situation, but is more of a spectrum; some features make things more difficult but can be tolerated, whilst others might be negotiable once on a journey but deplete levels of energy and confidence so much that, if they are common, they end up putting the person off making the journey, and so exclude them. Being able to negotiate between these two situations was critical to working out the best trade-offs between the needs of different groups of disabled people, where they are in conflict.

In order to ensure as complete a representation of the disabled community as possible within the limitations of the consultation, we identified 12 segments (each representing a combination of impairment and mobility strategy) with a distinctive set of needs with respect to street design. These covered mobility and sensory impairments (in combination with different mobility aids) as well as neurodiversity. We worked with various London based disability networks and organisations to recruit three or four participants in each segment.

The original plan was to shadow each participant on a route through the City that included examples of the different street types and design treatments for a range of street features present in the square mile. The pandemic ruled that out, so we created a methodology that could work remotely over video call.

We showed each participant a video of the route; for those with sight loss, it was audio described and accompanied by a box of tactile models of the more complicated layouts and features (which we would post to them and then collect and sanitise before reusing). We asked participants to comment on anything along the route that would make things either easier or harder for them. We then worked through a list of all of the individual elements that make up a street (like footway width, street furniture, dropped kerbs, tactile paving, crossing type etc.) and all the possible configurations for each one. Each participant scored each configuration for each element on a scale of 0 to 4, from “I’m always excluded by this no matter how I feel” to “This makes things easier for me relative to what I normally expect from a Central London Street”.

All the information we collected ended up in a spreadsheet, with the interface for the audit tool as the first tab. A designer can model a section of street (either existent or on the drawing board) by setting the value of a series of drop-downs covering all the elements, and the likely impact of each choice on each of the 12 needs segments is shown as the score and a colour (white for neutral, green for positive and shades of red for degrees of negative). Hovering next to each colour/score brings up a pop up with direct quotes from participants in that segment explaining how and why they are impacted by that element. In this way, the designer is presented with the lived experience of the participants at the point it will be most useful to them.

We have worked with City Corporation officers working on live design projects throughout the creation of the tool, and they are finding it useful as a way to flag up potential issues early in the design process, and identify what are likely to be good trade-offs where needs conflict. This should allow them to use the expertise of their access groups on the more complex issues, where their input can have the biggest impact.

Even with our carefully designed methodology, we still were not able to resolve all conflicts around street accessibility. There is one element in the tool that cannot be configured in a way that does not identify a significant issue for people in at least one needs segment. However, for all the others there do seem to be design treatments that, at least for the people who participated in our research, genuinely do represent good compromises between different needs. The better we get at listening to the people who use our streets, the better we will get at finding those compromises.