The phone says I’ve arrived. The building disagrees.
I’m standing outside a celebrated arts venue in South London, circling the façade in October darkness, looking for a door that the website promised would be right here. Level access. Three bus routes. A cheerful photograph of the entrance taken from inside a car park that’s closed to the public.
I’ve been walking around this building for eleven minutes.
The “Getting Here” page told me which bus to take. It told me there was step-free access. What it didn’t tell me was that the entrance is around a blind corner, marked by a sign you can only read if someone already told you it exists. It didn’t mention the four-lane road with no crossing between the bus stop and the building. It didn’t warn me that the tactile paving had been obliterated by resurfacing.
That page wasn’t designed for visitors. It was designed for lawyers.
But I design information systems for a living. And let me tell you what a building looks like when it actually wants you to find the door.
The Fire Alarm That Taught Me Everything
I was nine years old, sitting in a classroom that was emptying around me.
A fire alarm had gone off. I’m Deaf. I didn’t hear it. The other children moved toward the door in a pattern I couldn’t decode. No one touched my shoulder. The teacher who was supposed to alert me was already in the hallway. I figured it out when I saw bodies streaming in one direction through the open door.
The school had a policy. The policy said a teacher would notify deaf students during emergencies. The policy failed because policies aren’t architecture.
What would have saved me was a strobe light. A vibrating puck under my chair. Any system that communicated through a channel my body could actually receive without depending on a single person remembering to act.
That classroom taught me the difference that has defined my entire career: the difference between information delivery and information architecture. One gives you data and hopes for the best. The other builds an environment that communicates with your body continuously, through every channel it can find.
Every “Getting Here” page I’ve ever read makes the same mistake as that school policy. It says: we told you what to do. If you can’t do it, the failure lives in the gap between our instructions and your body.
The Building That Explains Itself
Now let me tell you about a building that gets it right.
The Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, designed by H.P. Berlage, completed in 1935. Berlage was obsessed with an idea that most modern architects have abandoned entirely: a building should explain itself to the body approaching it.
The approach to the museum is a sequence of spatial cues. Changes in material underfoot. A long reflecting pool that orients your body toward the entrance axis. A portico scaled so that you understand you are arriving before you reach the door.
None of this was designed for disabled visitors. Berlage wasn’t thinking about us. But the principle underneath it—that the building owes the approaching body an explanation of itself—that principle is exactly the thing missing from every access page I’ve ever audited.
I visited the Gemeentemuseum once in heavy rain. I found the entrance without looking at my phone. The building told me where it was.
The South London venue had a webpage. Berlage had an architecture.
That’s the gap. And it’s enormous.
What the Page Actually Protects
Here’s the concession I owe: “Getting Here” pages represent genuine effort. Someone sat down and thought about arrival. Someone compiled bus numbers and parking details and asked about lifts. Often that someone is a single access officer doing this work on top of everything else, underpaid for the specificity it demands.
The information isn’t wrong. It’s just not enough.
The real problem is what the page has replaced. A “Getting Here” section functions, institutionally, as proof that access was considered. It becomes the artifact that satisfies the compliance question. Did you provide access information? Yes. Here it is. Pointing to the page becomes the end of the process, not the beginning.
I know this because I’ve been the person institutions hire to audit their information systems. I’ve watched the moment when a venue director realizes their access page was copy-pasted from a template provided by their local council’s tourism board. The bus numbers were correct. The map was a screenshot from Google. The access information described the building as it was meant to be, not as it is.
One director told me: “We update it when someone complains.”
She wasn’t cruel. She was describing a system that treats access information as reactive—as a response to failure, not as a design practice.
The Difference Between Directions and Wayfinding
Turn left. Take the 37 bus. Use the rear entrance.
These are commands. They assume a body that can execute them in sequence, with the senses to identify “left” and “rear” in an unfamiliar environment, holding instructions in working memory while navigating physical space.
Most access information operates entirely in this mode. It tells you what to do. It never tells you where you are.
There’s a name for the thing that does: wayfinding. And it’s not the same as giving directions.
Directions are commands issued from above. Wayfinding is an environment that communicates spatial information continuously, through multiple channels, so a person can orient themselves without instructions. A well-wayfound space doesn’t need to tell you where to go because it shows you where you are.
I’m Deaf. I navigate primarily through vision and spatial reasoning. When I approach a building I’ve never visited, I read the environment the way you might read a paragraph—scanning for structure, hierarchy, emphasis, anomaly. A door set back from the façade reads differently from one that’s flush. A change in paving material communicates a threshold. A lit window reads as occupied.
These aren’t accommodations. They’re information. And most “Getting Here” pages assume I won’t need them because the page already told me what to do.
A Tale of Two Ramps
Here are two ramps. They tell you everything about the difference between compliance and design.
Ramp one: a cultural venue in East London. Bolted to the side of a short flight of steps after the building opened. Minimum legal width. Steep enough that a manual wheelchair user needs momentum to make the turn at the top. It ends at a door that opens outward—toward the person on the ramp. No level landing. Painted grey. Technically compliant.
Ramp two: the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, redesigned in 2019. There is no ramp. There’s a gradual slope integrated into a public courtyard, approaching the museum entrance at a gradient so gentle you don’t register the elevation change until you’re at the door. Same stone as the surrounding square. No moment where you’re sorted into “stairs person” or “ramp person.” You’re just a person approaching a building that made its entrance legible to your body.
The East London venue’s website says “ramped access at the main entrance.” The Utrecht museum’s page says less about access because the building says it instead.
I’m not pretending the Utrecht approach is easy or cheap. It required an architectural intervention, real money, and someone with decision-making power who said: the approach is part of the building, and the building must explain itself to every body that approaches it. That’s a design commitment. And it’s precisely the commitment that a “Getting Here” page allows an institution to defer.
The Typography Problem No One Sees
Here’s something I notice in every access page I audit, and it’s a typography problem before it’s an access problem.
The information is presented in a single register. Same font weight, same size, same spatial hierarchy for “take the Northern Line to Kennington” and “the venue has a hearing loop.”
These are not the same kind of information.
One is logistical. One is architectural. One tells you what to do before you arrive. The other tells you what the building will do when you’re inside it. But they’re typeset identically, which means they’re treated identically, which means they’re thought about identically.
Christine Sun Kim made a piece called “All Day” in 2012 that charted the volume levels of her daily life as perceived by hearing people around her. She was mapping a power structure through information design—which sounds are acceptable, which are disruptive, which are inaudible and therefore nonexistent.
The “Getting Here” page does the opposite. It flattens a power structure into a uniform list so the hierarchy disappears. The bus route and the wheelchair ramp occupy the same visual weight. But they’re not the same. One is infrastructure that exists for everyone. The other is an accommodation that was fought for, legislated, and maintained only as long as someone checks.
When I design information systems, I use typographic hierarchy to make power visible. Bold for what the institution controls. Regular weight for what the visitor controls. Italic for what no one controls—the construction on the corner, the broken lift, the weather. This isn’t a gimmick. **It’s an admission that access is distributed across actors, and the institution is only one of