Author
Abstract
It has been nearly 30 years since the introduction of the first bespoke legislation preventing discrimination against disabled people in accessing commercial property, goods and services. Despite the rise in public awareness of disability promoted by the Paralympics, a global financial crisis, austerity and the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have taken disability rights off both the political and social agendas. Research published in 2020 identified commercial value in providing a truly inclusive built environment and for commercial property owners as well as those delivering goods or services to seek opportunity over obligation in providing above-minimum access. In an attempt to challenge the notion of a ‘one size fits all’ approach to access, this paper analyses disability-specific access needs as well as unpick the term ‘reasonable adjustment’. The paper focuses primarily on the access to buildings and not the accessibility of actual service provision. The paper identifies that the complexity of disability, the wide-ranging symptoms of individual impairments and the prevalence of those with more than one condition validates a one-size approach to designing for disabled people. Furthermore, when comparing the delivery of best practice solutions to facilitate access, the paper demonstrates that the majority of the necessary adjustments are essential (critical) and not just reasonable. While this is based upon the experiential understanding of access challenges by disabled people, it is also worth noting that there exist significant challenges from a service provision perspective in proving an inclusive environment. Removing the existing physical barriers within the built environment may be difficult and costly, and may appear unreasonable for some smaller organisations. Despite this, however, there are a number of relatively low-cost, high-priority adjustments that can make a difference. These, along with more complex adjustments, mean it is necessary to adopt a balanced, pragmatic notion of compromise that facilitates access while still being commercially viable.
Suggested Citation
Download full text from publisher
As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to
for a different version of it.
More about this item
Keywords
;
;
;
;
JEL classification:
- R3 - Urban, Rural, Regional, Real Estate, and Transportation Economics - - Real Estate Markets, Spatial Production Analysis, and Firm Location
Statistics
Access and download statistics
Corrections
All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:aza:jbsav0:y:2025:v:13:i:3:p:277-295. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Henry Stewart Talks (email available below). General contact details of provider: .
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through
the various RePEc services.