Assessing the disability inclusiveness of buildings

Abstract

With rights to access now become basic human rights, it demands a tool for building disability inclusiveness assessment to tell how far we have gone to include persons with disabilities (PWDs) in buildings. Calling for more researches in disability inclusive facilities and inclusive education in various international conventions and statements such as the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006) and the UNESCO Salamanca Statement (1994), the Physical Disability Inclusion Sub-score (PDIS) and the Visual Impairment Inclusion Sub-score (VIIS) as simple, quantitative and more objective tools for assessing higher education buildings were developed here. Other than that whether building professionals have knowledge of the way PWDs access and use buildings were at the same time examined.

This study consists of four parts with (1) conception, (2) the PDIS and the VIIS for assessing the disability inclusiveness of buildings, (3) main survey and (4) conclusion. By way of literature review, the PDIS and the VIIS frameworks were constructed and they were fine-tuned with inputs from building professionals and users with impairments in the pilot phase. NSFDSS but not the far more popular AHP was applied to weight the elements under the PDIS and the VIIS for both credibility and practicality reasons. In all, between March and July 2012, 20 building professionals, 22 persons with physical disability and 21 persons with visual impairment were surveyed. The PDIS and the VIIS then developed were much simplified with around 200 items under about 20 categories. Design was weighed by all to be more important than Management.

Following that 48 higher education buildings from four universities in Hong Kong were assessed in March to September 2013. The dispersal of the PDIS and the VIIS were found largely due to Design rather than Management. In the disability inclusion performance of different categories, Operations and Maintenance, and Management Approaches were respectively the best and the least well performed categories, and Vertical Circulation and Entrance were the more disability inclusive Design categories.

As for hypothesis testing, 13 working hypotheses were developed from 4 main hypotheses. By Spearman’s rank correlation test or the t-test, it was found that building professionals and both persons with physical disability and persons with visual impairment did not weigh the elements under the PDIS and the VIIS differently, and the mean values of the standard deviation of the weightings given by users with impairments were not greater than those given by building professionals. It is evidenced that building professionals somehow have knowledge of the way the physically impaired and the visually impaired access and use buildings, and impaired users are not biased on their experience.

Having the PDIS and the VIIS developed, it is in pole position to adjust and apply them to study other buildings such as health care facilities and office buildings. Towards a more progressively aggressive step is to make changes to them to examine the more complex issue of ageing friendliness of buildings for the grey population following WHO Age-friendly Environments Programme.