Direct Access

The employers winning the competition for talent are not always the ones offering the highest salaries. The winners are the organisations removing the barriers that keep skilled people out.  Nearly one in four working-age adults is disabled. An employer whose hiring doesn’t account for them is competing for a shrunken pool of candidates and

What are “Reasonable Adjustments”? Reasonable adjustments are legal changes, adaptations, or accommodations made by employers, service providers, or educational institutions to ensure that disabled individuals are not substantially disadvantaged. They promote equal access to opportunities, employment, and services. Many business owners think that reasonable adjustments are purely about avoiding legal

When was the last time you chose the stairs over the lift or escalator? For most people, the answer is rarely. Recent research from the University of Peking in Beijing, replicating earlier findings from the University of Montreal, found that people overwhelmingly favour the path of least resistance when navigating

Accessibility problems in retail parks are not accidental; they are a byproduct of the original commercial logic behind retail park design, and increasingly, they are becoming a major drag on footfall, dwell time, and long-term profitability, Large retail parks were originally designed around a simple commercial model: high-volume visits on

Most accessibility policies aren’t worth the PDF they’re saved in. That sounds harsh. It isn’t. A policy that nobody implements is a policy in name only, and the gap between what an organisation says and what it actually does is where the trouble lives. Customers notice. Regulators notice. The press

Most websites don’t work for one in five of their users. Most businesses don’t know it. Most agencies don’t tell them. That’s not an indictment of disabled users. It’s a description of an industry that has, for years, treated accessibility as someone else’s problem. The cost of that quiet decision

Most businesses don’t lose Deaf and hard-of-hearing customers in a single, visible moment. They lose them quietly, at various junctions of the visitor journey.  Whether it’s inaccessible marketing, broken checkout flows, or ineffective customer support, the outcome is the same: frustration. And that frustration shows up in the metrics businesses already track. Lower conversions. Weaker sales

Micro-apartments have a floor they cannot go below, and that floor is set by accessibility standards. This is not a constraint to resist. It is the reason housing remains habitable for the population that actually exists.  Micro-apartments are like the fast food of the housing market. In certain situations they can be convenient, sometimes necessary,

Every hotel strategy meeting, across the UK and Europe, returns to the same three questions.  How do we extend the season?  How do we reduce the trough between peaks?  How do we build loyalty in a market with low switching costs?  This summer will take care of itself. Occupancy is

Introduction Disabled travellers are the most under-served audience in UK tourism, despite being one of its most commercially valuable.  Nowhere is that truer than in the UK holiday park and caravan sector.  For decades, disability charities, community groups and family networks have been block-booking UK holiday parks. Not because operators marketed to them.

E-commerce doesn’t have a traffic problem. It has a completion problem. Customers are landing on your site, engaging with products, and then dropping off before purchase. Not because of price. Not because of competition. But because something in the journey is getting in their way. Most retailers don’t see it.

Recently, the BBC published an alarming article that identified a growing gap between the support required for ASN pupils and what schools are currently able to deliver due to limited support staff, resources, and limited guidance. The article also points out that almost 300,000 Scottish school pupils (about 43% overall) are categorised as ASN, with the

Anyone who knows anything about Direct Access likely understands that as a consultancy founded by people with disabilities, we take an empathetic, person-focused approach to accessibility and inclusive design.  Of course, as a business, we also try to highlight how providing disability access provides social and financial value to our clients, but