Dear David Croft and Accessibuilt members,
David, thank you for taking the time to annotate the Toilet Audit
Tool. Your notes are extremely helpful, but they do illustrate the
difficulty of carrying out research in this area.
Perhaps we should have made it clearer in our original communication
that the tool is wholly based on the ADM, which is why we have
restricted the dimensions cited in the tool to the most important of
those given in the actual document, rather than adding to those
recommendations additional standards based on what we already know to
be limitations on access by, say, people with a baby buggy or in a
powered wheelchair.
Nor did we wish to add information based on what we know of users'
own preferences in respect of design, to this particular tool. We are
gathering information on users' requirements in a separate exercise,
through the use of personas and through a separately designed user
needs form. In this, we are eliciting users' preferred items of
equipment and preferred dimensions. Needless to say, they vary
widely. For example, we have already run focus groups with users in
association with Pamis, who have been advising us about the project,
but thank you for mentioning them as maybe not everyone on the
network is aware of the sterling work they do. Again, what our
Advisory Group tells us will be helpful, is to know the actual
proportions of people who regularly use the different items of
equipment provided, such as the drop down rail, or the vertical grab
rails.
Once we have gathered the information on what is provided and what
the users want, in separate exercises, we will then compare the data.
So far as the Audit Tool itself is concerned, we have already audited
60 premises owned or managed by private providers in Clerkenwell
ourselves, and so we already know that most if not all of the
premises we looked at ourselves have major design faults. What we are
now trying to establish is which aspects of the recommendations in
ADM are complied with by more or most providers, and which are
observed the the least. This is really what the tool is for as a
research instrument, but when we have fine tuned it, it should
provide a checklist for providers to use on their own premises to
check their own facilities. We are gathering our own material on
this, but we hope to widen the resources at our disposal by gathering
information from other networks of people with an interest in these
issues, which is why we asked for Accessibuilt's help.
The notes you have added to the basic tool illustrate another
dilemma. We needed a tool that could be administered quickly, without
too much fuss, by someone with minimal training, otherwise it will
not be used. This is particularly true of the providers of accessible
toilets, who would welcome something simple that they can use to
check their own premises, but who will shy away from something that
gives the impression of being too complicated and onerous. We have
therefore taken the advice of the Centre for Accesible Environments
on this and distilled the tool onto 2 sides of A4. This has meant
that some of the recommendations have not been given in full, or
shorthanded in qualitative terms like 'robust' or 'easy to use', and
others have not been mentioned at all. Your fuller version is 7 pages
long. We also had long and detailed discussions with our Advisory
Group, on how much detail to include and the consensus from this
group was that we had got it about right.
Howver, please be assured that I'll be going through your
recommendations in detail. I have spotted some things that we
definitely need to add, and other comments that are more akin to
recommendations to extend the ADM, that will feed into the user needs
side of the equation. Yet other comments will feed into the text that
will accompany any end product from the project, which still has
about 18 months to run. We are talking to in excess of 40 different
user groups at present, including faith based communities and
families with children at various ages, as well as older people and
people with a very wide range of health concerns. For us to adjust
the guidance in the ADM is therefore premature. I'll have to contain
my impatience until we have finished the research and can support our
final recommendations with the evidence provided by all our end-users
and by everyone who has inspected premises as part of the study.
Can I finish by saying that everyting that David has mentioned will
be used in the study in some way, so if other people have information
or recommendations that they feel we should know about, please
contact us as everything adds to the weight of evidence that our
current guidelines are inadequate and serve to exclude lots of people
from using the public realm.
Best Regards, Julienne
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