AccessOK is a step-by-step assessment of your premises in terms of being accessible to disabled people. The HealthCheck 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 modest deviations from this may still allow adequate disabled access.
Once you've answered all the questions in your HealthCheck, 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.
AccessOK is a comprehensive 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 Healthcheck 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 later.
Choosing our Premier service means you can carry out full HealthChecks repeatedly 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 and place of premises - you must purchase additional 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 HealthCheck.
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 a HealthCheck 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 EA. 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 EA and you should review these for yourselves in making a judgement of what to undertake.
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 disabled access HealthCheck 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.