Being compliant doesn’t necessarily equate to good design. While most working in the accessibility field will know the term DDA (or Disability Discrimination Act), many project managers, architects, builders and other construction professionals will use the term without understanding its full meaning.
What is the difference between the DDA and BCA?
The first thing to understand is the distinction between the different accessibility standards. Most fundamentally, it’s vital to understand that the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) and the Building Code of Australia (BCA) are not one and the same. While elements of both interact at many junctures, they cover different elements of the building and compliance process.
For one thing, the DDA is a federal requirement and operates above the BCA. In fact, most of the time, when a BCA non-compliance instance needs to be addressed, the DDA may be referenced to take precedence over the BCA outcome. While this seems logical, it also comes with a number of potential issues.
The most significant problem with relying on the DDA is that it’s not regulated by any single authority during the building design phase. For example, no single authority ensures that builders, project managers, or developers design and construct buildings according to DDA compliance certification.
Sometimes, councils might ask for a universal design review. In other instances, some private enterprises may be aware of the need to meet accessibility requirements and will initiate their own engagement for a DDA review. However, a majority of the time, it’s left up to the access consultant to introduce, educate, and literally ‘sell’ the client on why they need to consider a DDA review. The Jensen Hughes team always does its best to provide DDA advice.
Compared to the DDA, the BCA can be seen as largely a tick-the-box exercise. Everything is quantified, provided in examples, and either complies or doesn’t. The BCA framework doesn’t apply in every situation. For one thing, the BCA would be too extensive if its purpose was to cover the permutations of every type of development in size, combination of use, site fall, and state it’s based in.
Essentially, the BCA provides the general framework and minimums for the industry to follow. But really, it should be built on from there. Developers, builders, architects, and project managers are also seemingly always designing to these minimums instead of taking the basic framework as good enough.
Why is it important to be accessibility compliant?
We frequently work with clients who have not undergone an official DDA review and believe that, because they haven’t faced any issues, there won’t be one in the future. Unfortunately, this thinking has led to a series of regrettable events.
For those who choose to continue working without DDA compliance, the risks are numerous. In essence, operating without DDA compliance leaves many in the industry at the mercy of users who do not flag an issue or comply with the Human Rights Commission – a situation that anyone in the industry would prefer to avoid.
The need to pay heed to these risks and underlying accessibility requirements is growing. Millions of Australians require accessible housing, and the number is steadily rising as we all continue to live longer.
People know their rights, and the power of information-sharing tools, such as social media, means it’s easier than ever to document a situation that has left an accessible user with hardship. In short, it’s important to be accessibility compliant because it’s not only risky not to be, but it’s also the right thing to do.
How do the DDA and BCA accessibility standards work together?
All projects should provide a DDA review. As previously mentioned, DDA compliance isn’t a choice – it’s a federal requirement. The fact that these reviews aren’t conducted across every project is perplexing. Similarly, the BCA should be more than a tick-the-box exercise that aims to meet a minimal standard. For context, I’ve outlined an example of BCA compliance, but a DDA Human Rights Commission complaint that would hold up.
For a convention centre (Class 9b), the BCA under Section F2.4(a) only requires an accessible bathroom at 50% of the standard bathroom banks per level. The convention centre is large and includes ballrooms, lecture halls, and other mixed uses. There are 2x bathroom banks for the convention centre in each wing. The BCA asks that 1x of these banks provide an accessible bathroom and, by extension, ambulant bathrooms.
The lecture/event that the accessible user is attending is in Hall 1. The accessible user needs to use the bathroom and finds the wayfinding at Toilet Bank 1 indicating that Toilet Bank 2 has the accessible bathroom and ambulant facilities. They now need to travel over 50 metres to the Toilet Bank 2, undertake the pan transfer (which might not suit them due to their impairment), and then return another 50 metres to Hall 1. In comparison, a non-physically impaired user travels ten metres to the bathroom and returns to the lecture an average of 30 minutes faster than the accessible user.
Due to the nature of the design, the accessible user might have:
- Experienced significant hardship for the distance travelled compared to the standard user who went to Toilet Bank 1.
- Missed all or part of a lecture they paid for due to the time it took them to use the facilities.
- Potentially had an accident in the bathroom while rushing or being fatigued from travelling a significant distance.
- Encountered other obstacles due to the nature of their impairment and the not ‘fit-for-purpose’ facility, forcing them to find an accessible bathroom on another floor or venue.
Astoundingly, this design would be compliant with the BCA. The accessible bathroom is provided at 50% of the toilet banks, meeting the BCA requirement. The building certifier would provide the venue with an occupation certificate. Now if there’s a claim in the future, the venue would not be liable. Further to this, the Human Rights Commission complaint falls on the owner.
A few key questions remain, especially for access consultants. For example, should the BCA consider quantifying the distance between accessible bathrooms to eliminate this issue? In my opinion, it should. But in reality, this instance is simply one of many where BCA compliance tries to comply with a DDA example. In some cases, such as a recent example on the Sunshine Coast, the cost of misalignment between the two codes can run into the millions.
Preventing this type of confusion isn’t always possible. However, as with this example, a DDA report could have been done to introduce some important elements to the building and construction process, namely, opportunity, equity and equality – all the things we strive to uphold in the work we do at Jensen Hughes.