Abstract: “With rights to access becoming basic human rights, a tool for building disability inclusiveness assessment is necessary to tell how far we have gone to include people with disabilities in buildings. This article proposes a Building Inclusiveness Assessment Score (BIAS) framework which is made up of two hierarchies of inclusion attributes, namely the Physical Disability Inclusion Sub-score (PDIS) and the Visual Impairment Inclusion Sub-score (VIIS). The tool allows simple, quantitative and more objective assessments of buildings. Using the tool, forty-eight university buildings from four universities in Hong Kong were assessed for illustrating its real-life application.”

Keywords: Barrier-free access; building performance assessment; disability inclusion; universal design