What does accessibility analysis involve?

The exact tasks involved in accessibility analysis will vary depending on the specific type of analysis you want to do, the level of detail and the type of data you're using. However, all analysis should include seven broad steps—starting with a clear definition of what you consider to be the issues at the beginning, right through to producing and validating results.

The different stages of an accessibility assessment are as follows:

1. Define what you think the issue might be. This is perhaps the most important step in any analysis, but often remains overlooked. It's also discussed in greater detail in the earlier chapter on Identifying Problems and Priorities


2. Based on the above, list the information and types of outputs you think are needed to get a better understanding of the issue. It may be difficult to be precise at this point but subsequent iterations will further focus your analysis. This helps you to prioritise specific research, data preparation and analysis tasks and keeps you in touch with the project’s overall purpose while getting on with other tasks


3. Select an appropriate methodology for the analysis. This will be determined by the kind of issue you’re investigating and the information decision makers will require. However you may have to revisit this step depending on the outcomes of the next two stages


4. Define the data requirements. This will vary greatly for different types of analysis and different locations but in every case one thing remains true—it’s important to have a full understanding of all the data that’s required at an early stage


5. Research data availability. Reconcile the data you want with the data that is available within the timeframe of the analysis. This process can have a big effect on what you can practically deliver


6. Clean and validate the data. Be sure to spend time getting this right. All too often, not enough attention is given to this stage, leading to inaccurate results that are difficult to ‘de-bug’ later and which undermine the credibility of your analysis


7. Produce the analysis and refine it if necessary. It’s important to not only produce and present your results at this stage, but to also test those results by seeking informed criticism of the outputs

Analysis Resource 5, Analysis Stages contains more detail of what each step might involve. It also includes links to other, more comprehensive, resources such as Analysis Resource 2, Types of Measure, Analysis Resource 1, Data for Accessibility Analysis and Analysis Resource 3, Maps For Strategic Assessment, which give examples of how analysis might be applied.

Next Section ... How do you avoid the ‘pitfalls’ of accessibility analysis? ...