AccessOK is a step-by-step assessment of your premises in terms of being accessible to disabled people. The Self Assessment goes into detail about the requirements and, in order to answer the questions, you'll need to make measurements of various aspects such as doors, corridors, step heights and ramp inclines.
One convenient feature of AccessOK is you can logout whilst you're making these measurements and return to the same point later.
Please remember the information in AccessOK reflects present considerations of best practice and slight deviations
from this may still allow adequate disabled access.
Once you've answered all the questions in your Self Assessment, AccessOK produces some reports:
- Disability Access Status Report. This defines the aspects of your premises which are satisfactory in letting disabled people use your services.
- Disability Access Action Plan. This defines the areas where you don't meet best practice in providing access to your services by disabled people and suggests ways to rectify them.
- Access Statement. This informs customers you have undertaken a Disability Access assessment and refers to the Status Report. You can display this in your premises if you wish to indicate to customers how you are addressing disabled access issues.
The Self Assessment
AccessOK is a comprehensive, professional assessment service tailored to your type of premises.
It takes time
to answer the questions properly but you can stop and restart from where you left off as many times as
you need.
How long a full assessment takes depends on what facilities your premises has.
To work through the assessment, you must select an answer to each question. If the answer doesn't fit exactly, don't worry.
Choose the answer nearest to your situation.
You can always annotate the reports produced or use our unique "Unreasonable to Change" facility to clarify the situation.
You can carry out full Self Assessments repeatedly (although you must contact us after 5 assessments to reset your login)
so you have a record of any improvements made to
enhance disabled access. Old reports and plans are kept so you have an audit trail of your efforts at improving the environment
for disabled people
Reports and plans are only generated when you have answered the full set of questions associated with your type of premises (and your self
assessment only covers one type of premises - you must purchase other subscriptions for different ones).
This is to avoid misleading or only partial reports being given to you. But you can look at your latest Status Report and Action Plan as soon as you
logon to AccessOK Self Assessment.
When answering a question, you might feel you nearly meet the best practice requirement, that the feature won't significantly
detract from good disabled access and you're going to say you are compliant. We've left a space for you to write Notes when you print out
the Status Report so you can reference those types of points there.
If you don't meet the requirement but think it unreasonable to change your premises, just answer "No" and use the facility in the Action
Plan (see below) to make your point about it being "Unreasonable to Change".
As you are carrying out the assessment, you might want to return to the previous question to review or change the answer. Please use the "Go Back to Previous Question" button rather than the browser Back button. It makes it easier and quicker for us to record assessment results and generate reports and plans.
Disability Access Status Report
These are the good aspects of your premises - aspects which help disabled people use your services -
or aspects which you consider
it unreasonable to change even though they don't meet best practice (see Action Plan below).
As documents prepared by the government recognise, just taking the Self Assessment is an indication of
your good
intentions in addressing disability issues. The Status Report is a document you can present to people
or organisations
who are judging your premises for disabled access and who may be considering legal action
under the terms of the DDA.
Disability Access Action Plan
This is a list of aspects of your premises which don't meet best practice for disabled access. Some are more important than
others so we've prioritised them as Priority 1 most important, through Priority 2 and Priority 3 less important.
These priorities reflect our interpretation of the DDA and you should review these for yourselves in making a judgement of
what to undertake.
However, an authorative interpretation of the provisions of the DDA states
The Act also gives service providers flexibility when deciding the most appropriate way of ensuring that disabled people can use their services.
So, in the Disability Access Action Plan, we give you the facility to designate an aspect of your premises as "Unreasonable to Change"
and type in a note explaining your reasons. These "Unreasonable to Change" items are then transferred to the Status Report
with your explanation.
So, for instance, you may have a floorspace with long pile carpets which would impede wheelchair access. You
might only be willing to change to
firm short pile carpet as your present carpets wear out. Use our "Unreasonable to Change" facility
to say this. In
the meantime, say your staff will help wheelchair users to cross the area safely.
It might sound rather complicated but we've made it easy-to-use in practice. It's an effective way of getting your point across and being able to respond positively to any complaints.
Access Statement
This is a statement indicating you have undertaken a disability assessment and referring to the Status Report.
It is a single page document capable of being printed off and displayed in your premises.
Again it shows a responsible approach to making your services accessible to disabled people and would be the first document
to show to a dissatisfied disabled customer.
If you want to print the Access Statement without the information at the top and bottom of the page (the header and footer),
configure your browser in the following way.
1. Select "File" and then "Page Setup". A box comes up as shown below.
2. Remove the entries for Header and Footer. The box should look like below.
3. Select "OK" to save your settings.