Do you need to worry about disabled access for your fitout?

Below we have listed some of the more basic items that absolutely have to be considered at the design stage of any office fitout.

1. Circulation space around doors. Depending on the approach direction of any door way there is an “exclusion zone” which must be kept clear. This has lead to much wider corridors and entrances than most people believe is required.
2. Door colour, you can no longer have you door the same colour as your wall, there has to be a 30% luminance contrast difference between the wall and the door. Believe it or not even the toilet seat has to have a 30% luminance contrast to the background. This is to assist people who are visually impaired.
3. Passing spaces are required when corridors exceed a set distance, and corners of corridors need to have enough room to allow for a wheel chair to turn in them with out doing a 3 point turn.
4. Reception design, what do you do when someone in a wheel chair comes into your reception area. Do you have an area for them to wait in that is not the hall way? Do you have a way to talk to them from the reception counter that doesn’t mean you have to lean over the hob and speak down to them? Consider how you would like to be treated if you were in their situation.

So that’s just a few of the many considerations that we put into our office fitout designs.

The answer is of course YES!