As told by Megan Barclay – Be. Accessible Programme Director
Imagine a world where every person, building and community is truly accessible. That world is what Be. Accessible has set out to create.
Be. Accessible uses the Brilliant Assessments tool to offer assessments of the business as a pay-for service. Assessors visit businesses and work through the online assessment, talking to business managers and doing a physical appraisal.
The survey is extremely comprehensive, it comprises of over 800 questions that are divided into 4 sections, and there are a total of 44 sub-sections. Most of the answers are multi-choice, so that the assessor can work through them very quickly, but there are some text answer types too. Because there are many types of business and each one has a unique combination of facilities, questions in a subsection only appear for the assessor to reply to when they indicate that that subsection is relevant to this business.
Each selected answer is input to an algorithm to give the business a grading for each section. Questions are also cross-referenced as to their relevance to different accessibility needs (e.g. mobility, vision, hearing) so that a more definitive rating is available to each impairment group.
The system then generates a comprehensive report – advising the business on where it stands from an accessibility perspective, and provides advice on how it can improve accessibility and its rating.
Just as importantly the system generates website content that is available via an application program interface (API), which make all of our ratings and a full description of the accessibility features of each business available via a very flexible searchable interface. Authorised third-party websites can also access this content via the API to improve their information with accessibility ratings and detailed information.
Megan Barclay, Be. Accessible Programme Director, continues: “We have total control over every aspect of the assessment within the software – the questions, the answers, the feedback, the ratings, everything. Using the analysis section we can report to our stakeholders on how well the Be. Accessible goals are being met, and how that is improving over time.”