Auditing an Existing Building

An access audit is a structured examination of an existing building - or a single room, or one journey through it - against the needs of the full range of people who use it and against current accessibility guidance. Its job is to find where the place excludes people and to say, concretely and in priority order, what to do about it. It is a design and management tool, not a stamp of approval.

It helps to be clear about what an audit is not. It is not a building-code inspection. A code check asks whether the building satisfied the rules in force when it was built or altered; a great many buildings that were entirely lawful when built are deeply inaccessible today. An access audit asks the more honest, more useful question: can a disabled person actually arrive, get in, reach and use every function, and get out safely - now? That question is answered by walking the building as its users do, not by reading its approval file.

An audit also is not a one-off event that produces a drawer-filed PDF. Done well it is the opening move in a rolling programme: you audit, you prioritise, you fix what you can, you re-audit, and the building gets steadily better. The audit's value is entirely in what happens after it.

Who commissions one, and why? A university before term; a hospital; a temple or a museum wanting to welcome more visitors; a landlord meeting an anti-discrimination duty; an employer who has just hired someone who uses a wheelchair. In India the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (RPwD) Act 2016 and its Harmonised Guidelines frame access to public buildings as an obligation and have driven access-audit programmes across public infrastructure; elsewhere the Americans with Disabilities Act, the UK Equality Act and ISO 21542 do similar work. The audit is how an owner turns that broad duty into a specific, actionable list.

And remember the spine of this whole course: barriers are design decisions. An audit is simply the disciplined act of finding the decisions someone made - or defaulted into - that exclude people, so they can be re-made. You are not hunting for blame; you are hunting for the next set of things to design better.

A good audit is repeatable: another competent auditor walking the same building should reach broadly the same findings. That reliability comes from following a method rather than wandering with a clipboard. Four moves carry it.

1. Scope and brief it. Agree what is being audited and against what. The whole site or one floor? Public areas only, or staff-side too? Which reference - the local code, the RPwD Harmonised Guidelines, ISO 21542, the client's own standard? Get the drawings, the occupancy, the known problems, and the client's ambitions. A tight scope keeps the report useful; an unbounded one produces a document nobody reads.

2. Walk the whole journey. This is the heart of it, and Module 1's idea of the accessible route is your spine: access is a chain, and it breaks at its weakest link. Start at the site boundary - the bus stop, the car park, the drop-off - and walk the continuous journey a visitor makes: approach, entrance, reception, horizontal circulation, vertical circulation, each destination (the office, the ward, the classroom, the WC), and the way out, including the emergency way out. Walk it as different people: a wheelchair user, someone with low vision, a Deaf visitor, an older person with a stick, a parent with a pram. The single step, the sprung door, the reception counter you cannot see over, the lift with no spoken floor announcement - these show up only when you travel the route, not when you read the plan.

3. Measure and benchmark. Where the journey feels wrong, measure it and compare against typical guidance - a clear door width of around 800-900mm, a ramp gradient no steeper than roughly 1:12, a turning space of about 1500mm, grab rails and switches within a comfortable reach range, luminance contrast on critical surfaces. Frame every number as guidance to confirm against the binding local code, not as a universal law - codes differ by jurisdiction and change. A tape measure, a spirit level or level app, a light meter, a door-pressure gauge and a camera are most of your kit.

4. Record as you go. Photograph every issue, note its exact location, and write what you observed in plain terms. A finding is a fact plus a place plus a photo - 'the accessible WC on level 2 has the grab rail on the wrong side for a right-hand transfer; see photo 14' - not a vague 'toilets need work'.

A raw audit can throw up a hundred findings, and a flat list of a hundred things is a way to fix nothing. The auditor's real skill is triage: turning observations into a ranked plan the client can actually act on.

Two axes do most of the work. Impact - how badly does this barrier exclude people, and how many? A step at the only entrance excludes every wheelchair user from the whole building; a slightly low mirror in one WC is a minor annoyance. Effort - what will it cost and disrupt to fix? Re-hanging a door to swap its handing is trivial; installing a lift into a building with no shaft is a major project.

Plot findings against those two axes and a sensible order appears:

                 HIGH IMPACT
                     |
   MAJOR PROJECTS     |     QUICK WINS
   plan & fund        |     do now
   ------------------+------------------
   RECONSIDER         |     FILL-IN
   low value          |     do when nearby
                     |
                 LOW IMPACT
        HIGH EFFORT   <->   LOW EFFORT

Quick wins - high impact, low effort - are gold: contrasting nosings on a staircase, a lever handle, relocating a grab rail, a portable ramp for a small threshold, moving a bin out of the accessible route, adding a hearing loop at the counter. Do these almost immediately; they build momentum and show good faith. Major projects - high impact, high effort, like the missing lift or the rebuilt entrance - go into a costed, phased plan tied to future capital works and refurbishment cycles, so access is designed in when the scaffolding is up anyway. Fill-in items are done opportunistically when you are working nearby. And the low-impact, high-effort quadrant is where you pause and ask whether it is the best use of a limited budget at all.

Two more lenses sharpen the ranking. Safety first: a barrier that endangers - an unguarded drop, a step with no contrast at the top of a flight, a refuge that does not work - jumps the queue regardless of cost. And the route lens: fixing a mid-route barrier is wasted if the person could never get past the entrance, so mend the chain in sequence, from the boundary inward. Priority is not just a score; it is a story about how the building becomes usable, link by link.

The audit is only as good as the report, because the report is what other people act on months later. A strong access-audit report has a recognisable shape.

It opens with an executive summary a busy director can read in two minutes: the building, the scope, the reference standard, the headline findings, and the top handful of priorities. Then it sets out the findings, organised along the journey - approach, entrance, circulation, sanitation, and so on - so a reader can follow the route. Each finding is written the same disciplined way:

FINDING 12  -  Main entrance
Barrier:   a single 150mm step at the only public entrance.
Excludes:  wheelchair & mobility-scooter users; hard for prams,
           trolleys, people with a stick. (High impact.)
Guidance:  entrances should offer a step-free approach; confirm
           the binding detail against the local code.
Fix:       form a level or ramped approach; if space allows a
           1:12-or-gentler ramp with handrails, else a lift.
Priority:  HIGH   Effort: MAJOR   Cost band: B

Notice what each finding carries: the barrier, who it excludes (in permanent / temporary / situational terms), the relevant guidance framed as verify-locally, a specific recommendation, a priority, and an indicative cost band. Photographs and plan references are attached. Where the fix is genuinely uncertain or contested - a listed heritage facade, a structural constraint - say so honestly and flag it for specialist input rather than inventing a tidy answer.

Two things separate a report that changes a building from one that gathers dust. First, it is owned: it names who is responsible for each action and, ideally, a target date, so the audit becomes a live action plan rather than a description of problems. Second, its language is humane and non-alarmist: you are helping an owner make their building welcome, not scolding them. Frame findings as opportunities and design decisions, quantify the benefit, and the client is far more likely to fund the work.

Finally, an audit is a snapshot in time. Note the date and the standards you checked against, recommend a re-audit interval, and treat it as the first turn of a cycle. The best proof an audit worked is a second audit, a year later, with far fewer findings - and a building measurably easier to arrive at, enter, use and leave.