Hope Project - La Pilar Learning Centre

Kathy Sinnott

Accessibility that's about ramps, wider doors, warning beeps, light switches and sockets at hand level. Right? Only partly.

Just when we thought we had accessibility figured out and design and building regulations in place, DCD, ADD, ASD, and an alphabet of other conditions has emerged with a variety of different and urgent accessibility requirements.

If everyone is going to be able to use our man-made physical environment the architect, engineers, planners and builders of today will have to be even more creative than in the past. They must produce an environment with soft surfaces and rounded edges for users of the building who have epilepsy and eliminate soft furnishings for those with asthma.

"The impossible we can do, miracles take a little longer." You may think that trying to keep the various accessibility requirements in mind and more importantly trying to reconcile all of them on a drawing will guarantee a bin of crumbled paper (don't forget to recycle) and a wrecked head.

Before deciding to pack it in and retrain for a job in the fishing industry, remember what accessibility is all about. Accessibility is about living as a community; about opening the man-made physical environment and extending the natural environment to those whose disabilities would otherwise close it. Accessibility is a Right and it is a welcome.

To have any hope of achieving a fully accessible building project, think past the can'ts: can't have steps, can't have florescent lighting�Learn the challenges and sufferings of the condition. Try to imagine having the condition. Then try to imagine using the planned facilities. Make your way around your designs with the condition.

You suddenly have Developmental Coordination Difficulties DCD and you must get from one floor to another. You have a tendency to fall so you would rather not use the stairs. You have difficulty with motor planning, that is sequencing and carrying out movement, so elevators with their timed responses and escalators with their relentless movement, pose significant problems.

Or you have autism and you have only a small box of reliable vision available to you, outside of which everything is a blur of moving colours.

Got the idea. Now see what you as a designer or implementer, come up with.

I am not asking you to do something I have not attempted to do. I have had to adapt my home for my son, Jamie, who struggles with the sensory and motor issues of autism and cerebral palsy and the dangers of epilepsy.

I mentioned that some persons with autism have only a small reliable box of vision. We see children with autism line up their little Matchbox cars and trucks. A parent who tidies them away faces major meltdown. Lining toys was considered a "bizarre behaviour" in the past but is quite logical when one considers that the child lines his toys up in order to keep track of them. By memorising the order the cars are in, the child can find them. With his box of vision, he can see one or two of them at a time, but by using the line he knows where the rest are. Tidied away he has the frustrating job of relocating them in what amounts to an abstract painting. He may also have some usable peripheral vision so when he searches for his cars he may look for them out of the side of his eye.

How does this affect design? It would help accessibility to keep an environment visually simple, putting the key functional items like light switches in seeable contrast. The light switch can be spotted peripherally and then viewed in the usable frame of vision.

In autism, there can be major disruption in hearing. Some people with autism cannot separate background sounds from foreground sounds. It can be hard for a person with autism to hear what someone is saying to him or her if music is playing or in a noisy setting. Some people have very uneven reception of sound frequencies. Some frequencies may be hard to hear and some may be painful. This may be different for each ear. I have often watched my son block his ears when an announcement comes over an intercom. The announcement, which breaks the silence or is louder and shriller than the piped music it interrupted, may be very important but will be shut out by the very people who may need its message and warning because they must protect their ears. Similarly, with smoke alarms, a shrill signal mobilises most people to action. Yet, a person with autism and hyperacute hearing may be immobilised by the smoke alarm. A lifesaver then becomes a life threatener.

Lighting is an area of importance in any design but especially in accessible design. About 40% of persons with autism have epilepsy, many are sensitive to flicker. This disqualifies florescent lighting as an option in a disabled friendly building. Natural lighting is always best but not always available. Full spectrum, even polarised lighting with its positive effects on the immune system, are a good choice. Shaded and indirect light from ordinary light bulbs are not too intrusive. In Jamie's class, we also use black light for short periods because it creates a stark contrast that is useful for some educational activities.

Electric fittings and appliances can be a problem for some persons with autism who are sensitive to hums, vibrations and magnetism. Parents often notice that their child with autism is happier and functions better at the granny's old farmhouse or the family's seaside caravan. Natural light, air, lack of appliances, toxic building materials and central heating may all relieve the child of the heavy burden of living with modern comforts.

Autism can be accompanied by anything from physical dysfunction to amazing agility. I remember watching a man-size twelve-year-old boy racing across a bungalow sitting room from one picture window to the other like a bull charging. At the last moment, he would perform the most delicate pirouette, twirling on his toes without a totter. After a moment stretched and suspended, he bent over and raced head down for the other window. I waited each time for the crash. After about five charges, I noticed that the other mothers and fathers in the room did not even seem to notice. He continued for about half and hour. My son Jamie on the other hand until recently would have found the walk from one window to the other an effort.

Possibly the most important consideration in making a building accessible to persons in the autistic spectrum is limiting the buildings toxicity. Autism and related disorders are medical conditions. One of the key dysfunctions is in the body's detoxification systems. These children are easily poisoned. They attract heavy metals like a magnet. Almost every cheap and readily available building material is harmful to them. Careful thought has to go into the selection of materials. We originally wanted to build La Pilar of wood until we realised that if we used more than a certain percent of wood, we would have to treat it with fire retardants. These chemicals would make wood more dangerous to a person with autism that some of the building materials we had rejected as toxic. I will stop here; hopefully this is enough to get you drawing.

Before I leave autism behind, there is another option. Though we must find ways to make life in our buildings easier for persons with an autistic spectrum disorder, we do not need to keep inflicting these disorders on children. We could try to avoid autoimmunity by reversing the trend to increasingly chemicalised environments. We could also resolve to respect and value the immune systems of babies and children. We must relearn to allow the immune system to develop naturally, if necessary supporting but not artificially orchestrating or interfering with its development.

In the meantime, architects, engineers, builders and planners face the enormous challenge of including everyone. It is vital that the challenge of accessibility is taken up and met successfully. In the process, you will gain more than experience and fees. If you design from the perspective of the disabled persons for whom you are designing, you will come to an appreciation of personhood itself. You will get beyond the mechanics of entering a building to the importance of being welcome, beyond meeting room and conference areas to the importance of communication, beyond kitchen and cooking and ventilation regulations to the importance of breaking bread. Special needs offer you the opportunity of transforming your job into a vocation.

Kathy Sinnott is the secretary of the Hope Project and mother of Jamie who has autism.