The Six Sides Audit

The full building audit. All six domains, the whole building and its approach, and a report you can actually act on rather than file.

This is the flagship, and it is the work everything else here is built around.

I walk the building the way a disabled person arrives at it

Not the way a facilities plan is organised. That is not a stylistic preference. Walking it in the order somebody actually arrives is what lets me see how barriers add up, and cumulative barriers are where real exclusion lives. Assess four things in isolation and all four can pass while the journey still fails.

A checklist that assesses each of those four items in isolation passes all four and misses the exclusion completely. Auditing in journey order is what lets me see it the way the person carries it: as a single running total.

What happens on the day

Ten zones, always in this order, because it is the order a visitor meets them:

1. Arrival: car park, accessible bays, drop-off
2. The route from parking to the entrance
3. The entrance itself
4. Reception and entrance hall
5. Horizontal circulation
6. Vertical circulation
7. The wheelchair-accessible toilet
8. The ambulant accessible toilet
9. Changing Places provision
10. Whatever your building is actually for: the auditorium, the studio, the gallery, the workshop

In every zone I ask the same sequence of questions across all six domains, record the persona impact, total the energy cost, and take a Welcome Factor reading.

Measured, never estimated

"Looks about 800 millimetres" is not a finding. Clear widths are measured at the narrowest point, after the obstacle, after the door furniture, after the radiator. Gradients are measured in every direction, because a bay can read level in two directions and still be unusable at 1:35 in the third.

Everything measured gets photographed with the tape in shot. So does everything that works, not only the failures.

The kit, with its tolerances

A lux meter accurate to within 10%, a laser measure to within 5mm, a door force gauge, a camera, and audio recording. The report names the equipment and its tolerance, and states plainly that this is primary observation rather than a desk review.

Every finding, built the same way

Each one is located precisely, tied to the domain it breaks, scored for priority, and costed three ways.

• P1, criticalA safety risk, a total barrier, or a Building Regulations failure.
• P2, importantA significant barrier where an alternative exists, or a BS 8300 failure where Part M is met.
• P3, enhancementA real usability gain beyond the standard.

And three costed options for each: the minimum that fixes it, the better answer, and the regenerative one where nobody has to ask next time.

What you get

One self-contained report in accessible HTML, with structured headings, real text rather than pictures of text, and a layout that works on screen, with a screen reader and on paper. I deliver in HTML rather than PDF because a PDF is where accessibility usually goes wrong, and handing you a document about access that you cannot read would be a poor start.

If you would rather read something than read about something, there is a full worked example of an access section on this site, written against article 9(3) for an invented arts centre. It is not an audit report, but it is the same hand and the same level of detail, and nobody had to give permission for it.

Part one, the diagnosis

What is wrong and why it matters. An executive summary, the methodology and its limitations, the building in context, the six domains scored and plotted, the personas, the lived-experience analysis, and the full barrier catalogue in priority order.

The scored profile gets interpreted rather than just displayed. A strong culture with weak infrastructure is a very different problem from the reverse, and it is a much easier one to fix. I will tell you which you have.

Part two, the prescription

What to do about it. A phased roadmap with an investment range per phase. A quick-wins table of what can happen this week, with cost, time and impact, always including at least one thing that costs nothing. The business case, including what the work returns rather than only what it costs. Funding routes, including Access to Work, Arts Council capital and heritage funds. And action guides by role, so it becomes somebody's job rather than nobody's.

It also hands you the answers to the pushback you will meet internally, because you will meet it.

Part three, the appendices

The standards index, the measurement data, the photographic evidence, the persona summaries, a glossary, and a plain statement of limitations. That last one matters: this is an access audit, not legal advice, not a fire engineering report and not a structural survey, and the report says so.

Context is a frame, not an excuse

If your building is the way it is because you relocated in three months after losing a lease, or because you inherited a restaurant fit-out, the report will say so. That explains why the barriers exist. It does not soften that they need fixing, and it usually makes the roadmap more realistic rather than less.

Afterwards

The report is delivered to the organisation it is about, even when somebody else commissioned it. That is written into the contract rather than left as a hope.

You get a follow-up conversation once you have read it. Beyond that, a verification visit after the work is done confirms what actually moved, and advisory exists for organisations that want the momentum to continue rather than stall.

Prices for the audit and everything else are published in full.

Before you appoint me, the bits a finance team asks for

I’m self-employed, working freelance under my own name. Not a limited company and not VAT registered, so there is no VAT to add and the invoice comes from me.

I’m insured. I’ll send the certificate with the proposal, or straight away if you need it on file before we talk.

Five years doing this work. Scope, fee and what you receive are agreed in writing before any paid work starts, and every price is published, so you can build the case before you contact me rather than after.

If you have a purchasing deadline, a supplier form or a threshold you have to work within, say so in the first email. It is much easier to work with than to work around.

A sentence or two about the building is enough to start. You do not need a brief. Or write to dean@deanfrankreynolds.co.uk directly, and copy the address if that is easier. If you would rather talk it through first, the first twenty minutes are free.