I can get in. That was never the question.

Ask most buildings whether they're accessible and they'll tell you about the ramp.

They're proud of the ramp. Someone signed it off, someone paid for it, and it's the thing they point at. And it's usually fine - I can get in.

Getting in was never the hard part.

The hard part is the ninety minutes after I'm through the door - and whether I've got anything left by the end of them.

What Physical access actually means

Physical is the first of the six domains I assess, and it's the one everybody thinks is the whole job.

It covers whether you can move through a space on your own, safely, without spending energy you needed for something else. Circulation routes. Door opening forces. Turning circles. Gradients. Rest points. What the floor does underfoot.

The question underneath all of it isn't "is there a route". It's whether you can navigate with dignity - and arrive with something left.

Those are different questions and they get different answers.

The accessible toilet behind three barriers

Here's the one I use, because it happens constantly.

A venue has a perfectly specified accessible toilet. Correct dimensions, grab rails in the right places, the transfer space where it should be - all of it right. On paper it passes. On a checklist it gets a tick.

To reach it you cross a gravelled forecourt. Then up a ramp at 1:12. Then through a door that takes 45 newtons to open - when the standard says 30 is the maximum.

That's not an accessible toilet. It's an accessible toilet behind three barriers.

Every one of those four things gets assessed separately by a standard checklist. Every one of them passes or fails on its own. The forecourt is "an external surface". The ramp is "a ramp". The door is "a door". The toilet is "a WC".

Four items, assessed in isolation, and the exclusion is invisible in all four.

Because the person doesn't meet them in isolation. They meet them one after another - in the same body, on the same morning, with the same finite amount of energy. By the time they reach the door they've already spent what the gravel took and what the ramp took. The 45-newton door isn't the barrier. It's the last one.

That running total is the thing a checklist cannot see, and it's the reason I walk a building the way a disabled person arrives at it rather than the way a facilities plan is organised.

Measured, never estimated

"Looks about 800 millimetres" is not a finding.

Clear widths get measured at the narrowest point. After the obstacle. After the door furniture. After the radiator somebody put there in 2019 - and nobody has looked at since.

Gradients get measured in every direction, because a bay can read level in two directions and still be unusable at 1:35 in the third. A chair rolls during transfer. That's not a technicality - it's someone on the floor of a car park.

Door forces get a gauge - not a shove from someone who can shove.

And everything measured gets photographed with the tape in shot. Including the things that work, not only the things that fail. A report that only records failure is a report nobody can act on, because it never tells you what to protect.

I say the tolerances out loud in every report: the lux meter is accurate to within 10 per cent, the laser measure to within 5 millimetres. If I'm asking a client to spend money on the strength of a number, they're entitled to know how good the number is.

Where this came from

I should say plainly what this is, because the site hasn't been saying it - and that's my fault.

The six domains are mine. I built them.

Not out of a standard, and not out of a training course. Out of thirty-six years of tried, tested, failed and figured-out solutions - and the pattern recognition that comes from an autistic brain that's been thinking about this since before it had words for it.

DIY sound dampening panels. Sourcing cheap wheelchair parts. Finding ways around systems that weren't built for me. Decades of working out, in real time and usually on my own - why a place that technically let me in still managed to send me home early.

The answer was never one thing. It was never just the ramp. It was the ramp and the lighting and the noise and the signage and the way the person on the desk looked at me, all landing on the same body in the same hour.

So when I started auditing professionally, one column wasn't going to do it - six was what it actually took to describe what I'd been living.

Here's what I'm different from.

The typical access consultant comes from the outside. Someone in an architecture practice who specialised because nobody else would, or because there's money in it. They know the building standards - genuinely well, better than I do in places. They produce a hundred-page report with thirty pages of photographs. And they stop exactly where the regulations stop, hiding behind the word "reasonable" while they tell a venue it's perfectly acceptable not to be accessible because the alternative costs too much.

I'd rather hand someone thirty pages of practical improvements they can make for nothing. Turn off the overhead lamps that are too bright. Get a clipboard instead of a new point of sale display. Use a different room for the thing that doesn't work in this one.

It is very reasonable to give a shit about disabled people.

Why Physical isn't enough on its own

If Physical were the whole job I'd have stopped at one domain and saved myself years.

Fix the Physical and ignore the Visual - and a wheelchair user with low vision still can't get round on their own. Get the Physical right and the Auditory wrong, and a Deaf member of staff is welcomed by your values and excluded by your fire alarm.

The interesting failures are almost always intersections. Heavy doors are a physical cost. Harsh lighting is a sensory cost. Put them in the same corridor and a neurodivergent wheelchair user meets something neither measurement would have predicted on its own.

A building designed only around wheelchairs can be actively hostile to someone autistic.

Six domains exist because people aren't one thing.

And before anyone says it

Yes, some of this is expensive. Some of it isn't possible in a listed building. Some of it needs a budget cycle you're two years away from.

None of that is an argument against knowing.

Every report I write costs each finding three ways: the minimum that stops the harm, the better answer, and the version where nobody has to ask next time. You pick. But you pick knowing - rather than finding out from someone who left and didn't tell you why.

And the free fixes come first, at the front, listed separately. There are always more of them than people expect.