Time to update accessibility and usability as functional requirement for building : Lessons learned from France, Germany, Ireland and the UK

The concept of accessibility and usability is a functional requirement in most European building regulations. It is minimum requirements introduced in most building legislations during the pe-riod of 1960 to 1980. Its aim is to safeguard that the built environment can be used by users with reduced mobility or cognitive problems navigating in space, often with the assistance of assis-tive technology. The requirements are also a reflection of society’s ambition to remove barriers for this group and include them on equal conditions in the surrounding society.This paper presents the result of interviews with five informants from France, Germany, Ireland and the UK. The interviews followed upon the informants’ approval and participation in an ques-tionnaire survey about the understanding of the concept of accessibility and usability in their countries and what the concept aimed to regulate in the built environment.The results demonstrate national strategies to deal with the societal ambition to include the group of people with disabilities on equal terms in the surrounding society. In Germany, the key concept is Barrierfreiheit (barrier freedom), in Ireland Universal design and in the UK inclusive design. Still struggling with making the built environment accessible, perhaps, France uses the concept of quality in using the built environment, thus, linking the concept clearly to the in-tended user group, but also to other concepts in vogue for the moment, i.e., sustainability.Transferred to the Swedish situation, accessibility and usability as a functional requirement is under attack and considered to increase the building costs. Do the four studied European coun-tries supply ideas for rethinking or developing the Swedish understanding of accessibility and usability? Can accessibility and usability be transferred into a matter of quality when using the built environment?