Architecture & Access provides specialist advice and solutions to achieve access within the built environment for people with physical, sensory and other forms of disability, their families and carers.
Working with architects and designers, building certifiers and surveyors, government agencies and managers of buildings, we ensure the requirements of access and universal design are incorporated into proposed developments.
We have up-to-date knowledge of requirements under current anti-discrimination laws, work health & safety legislation and building control regulations.
Architecture & Access offers a comprehensive range of services provided by experienced and qualified access experts.
Our in-house team includes access consultants, work health & safety consultants, project managers, architects, home modification experts, landscape designers, interior designers, and occupational therapists.
Services include:
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Our access consultants work with a wide range of new developments and building upgrades including:
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Involving us early in your project – particularly where a number of design options are being explored – assists in producing the most cost-effective design in collaboration with the architect and other consultants.
Our comprehensive audits, recommendations and design solutions may cover:
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Approximately one in five (four million) people in Australia have a disability. Of these, almost 90 per cent have a specific limitation or restriction on their ability to communicate, move freely or undertake self-care activities, or a restriction associated with schooling or employment.
There are 2.6 million carers in Australia providing care and support to people with a disability.*
With such a significant number of people affected by disability, access to the built environment is a key investment that is returned through attracting business patronage, increased productivity, improved education outcomes, increased employment participation, better health outcomes and reduced social isolation of people with disability, their families and carers.
Research has also shown that most Australians prefer to live in a society where equal opportunity is facilitated, and that for society in general, discrimination and unequal opportunity result in productivity and human capital losses that reduce everyone’s wellbeing.**
Accessible built environments also translate into obvious economic benefits in lessening the risk of discrimination complaints, legal fees, payouts, and loss of reputation.
*Source: 2009 Australian Bureau of Statistics Survey of Disability, Ageing and Carers.
**Source: Economics of equality. A joint project between the Victorian Equal Opportunity and Human Rights Commission and the Social Justice initiative at the University of Melbourne, Melbourne 2010.
Anti-discrimination laws and building control regulations make it against the law to discriminate against someone on the grounds of their disability and spell out the requirements to prevent discrimination from occurring.
The DDA requires access be provided to all levels of buildings and all facilities and services operating from them to which the public has a right to access, unless to do so would impose an unjustifiable hardship.