Say what you need before the booking is confirmed
Access is part of the arrangement, not an adjustment to it afterwards. Anything you need in order to attend is best said in the first message or in the reply to the offer, because that is while the day and the hour can still be chosen around it. Said afterwards it may mean releasing a confirmed hour and arranging another, which is two entries and a wait.
There is no form and no list of categories to pick from. Write what you need in your own words. The office answers in writing with what can be arranged at the address and what cannot, before anything is confirmed, so that a booking is never made on an assumption.
The questions the office answers in writing
Ask any of these and the answer comes back as a plain statement about the address, before an hour is offered. The office does not publish the answers here, because a page cannot be amended as quickly as a building changes and an out-of-date answer is worse than no answer.
- how many steps there are between the pavement and the room, and whether there is a handrail
- whether there is a lift, and the dimensions of it
- the width of the doorways on the route to the room
- whether the entrance has a threshold, and how high it is
- where the nearest place a vehicle can stop is, and how far that is from the door
- whether a companion or an assistance dog can wait, and where
- whether a ground-floor room can be arranged for a particular date
- what the lighting and the floor surface are like on the route
- whether there is a lavatory on the same floor
What goes into the confirmation
AAn arrangement about getting there
Agreed
Whatever is agreed about access is written into the confirmation for that booking, alongside the date and the start time. It is agreed once and repeated in every confirmation after it, so it does not have to be asked for twice.
If something agreed cannot be provided on a particular date, the office writes before the day rather than on it, and offers the choice of a different date or the same date without it.
Written down
- the arrangement agreed, in the words it was agreed in
- the date it was first agreed
- that it applies to every booking until a message changes it
- no reason for it, because none is asked for
The office does not ask why an arrangement is needed, and no reason is entered in the file. What is written down is the arrangement itself: a ground-floor room, a later start, a companion waiting. The file holds that because the diary has to act on it, and holds nothing further.
This website
The site has one navigation mechanism at every width: the dial in the corner, which opens with a keyboard as readily as with a pointer, closes on the Escape key, and works with JavaScript turned off. Every page reaches every other page from it. The first link on each page skips the masthead and the dial and goes to the page itself.
Text reflows down to a 320-pixel window with no sideways scrolling and no clipped line. The two sheets are the only moving parts; with scripting off their worked examples stay on the page as plain text. The band that passes down the page on loading, and the rules that draw themselves under the headings, are switched off entirely where a browser asks for reduced motion, and everything they would have drawn is shown already drawn instead. Nothing on the site conveys meaning by colour alone, and the drawings carry written descriptions.
If something here did not work
Write to the office at the address below and say which page and what happened. A note about the site is not entered in anybody’s file; it goes to whoever maintains these pages and is kept only until it has been dealt with.
The same applies to an access arrangement that was agreed and then did not hold on the day. Say so in writing. What is entered in that case is the fact that it did not hold and the date, because the next confirmation has to be written around it.