Public Building Accessibility: An Expanded Access Analysis Metric

Quality accessibility features significantly impact the user experience in public service facilities; however, much of the research in this area tends to focus on code compliance, limiting the ability to analyze accessibility quality in depth. Additionally, studies often concentrate on common mobility challenges, leaving less focus on other disabilities, such as cognitive and visual impairments. As a public institution, the University of Southern Mississippi depends on students' abilities to access its services, directly linking the institution’s value to the quality of its accessibility. To address this, we developed a set of survey questions to evaluate the accessibility features of campus buildings, with an emphasis on including underrepresented disabilities in the data. Data was collected from the Hattiesburg, MS campus and transformed into numeric values used to generate “accessibility scores” via the average response to survey questions. These scores reveal overall building accessibility and highlight campus-wide trends related to specific types of access. The results identify areas where accessibility efforts are lacking congruent with previous research and expected outcomes, indicating the efficacy of this form of analysis as a tool for identifying and prioritizing gaps in building accessibility, information which can be utilized to benefit disabled populations everywhere.