Accessibility notes for venues we attend.
Every venue’s own website says it is accessible. That word does almost no work. “Three steps at the door and no handrail” does all of it — and so does knowing where the quiet is, whether the bathroom door swings the wrong way, and how loud the room gets once it fills.
So we survey the places we go and write down what we actually find. Not a score, not a verdict, not a recommendation — field notes, taken by the people who will be in the room.
What’s in a venue page
The structure comes from our access survey, and its premise is blunt: we all need to be able to pee, poop, eat, drink, sit down, and get to quiet space and outdoor space. So every page walks the same ground in the same order — transportation, parking, doors and entrances, bathrooms, caves, campfires, and watering holes, seating, surfaces, sensory, food and drink, air, habits and meds, cognitive and communication.
Same order every time, on purpose. You should be able to find the bathroom paragraph without reading the page.
These notes say what we will do about it, too. A survey that stops at “the ramp is too steep” has described a problem and left it there. Ours reads: the concrete ramp to the front door is too steep, manual wheelchair users will need assistance, we will have assistants nearby at the front door. Barriers get named alongside the plan for getting past them, because we are not reviewing these places — we are going to them, and somebody has to bring the threshold ramps.
What these notes are not
They are snapshots. A building gets remodelled, a manager changes, a quiet corner becomes a speaker stack. A note describes what one group of people found on one day. Read the date, and tell us when something has changed.
They are not a verdict on the venue. Naming barriers is not an accusation. Most of these places have been good to us, and the notes exist so that the next person does not have to discover the door threshold with their front wheels.
Venues
- Dripping Springs, TX — full access surveys for Irie Smial Preserve, Hudson’s on Mercer, and Dreamland.
- Austin, TX — Halcyon (Mueller) and JNL Barbecue.
- Dripping Springs Friendship Club Venues — a working list of places the Friendship Club has used or considered, with addresses and phone numbers. Not surveyed yet.
Surveying somewhere new? Start with the access survey, and build the page from the Irie Smial Preserve template.