Can a wheelchair user assess your building before they travel to it?

Partly. A tour can show whether there is a step at your door, what the route between floors actually is, and what the approach from the car park looks like. It cannot tell anyone that a doorway is wide enough for their chair, that a door is light enough to open, or that a lift is working today. Two separate things matter here — what the tour shows, and whether the tour itself is usable — and we will not claim more about the second than we have actually tested.

What a tour can settle before a journey

• Whether there is a step or a threshold at the entrance, and what the door does — outward, inward, sliding, revolving.
• Whether a ramp exists, and where it leads. A ramp to a side door that is locked out of hours is a different fact from a ramp to the main entrance.
• How the building connects vertically, and by what. In our university tour the station names carry it in plain words — Floor Junction, Stairs to the 2nd Floor, 1st Floor Main Junction — so a reader can see before travelling that the route published between those floors is a staircase, and knows to ask about the alternative.
• What the arrival looks like. One of our hotel tours has the parking road, the parking entrance and the parking itself as stations of their own, before reception — which is exactly the part of a journey somebody is trying to picture in advance.
• How a bathroom is laid out, which side the space beside the fixtures is on, and whether the route to it involves a turn.
• Whether a counter or a desk has a lowered section, which is visible even from a standing capture.

None of this is a substitute for asking. All of it removes the version of the conversation that starts “I could not tell from the photographs”, and it does so at two in the morning without anybody having to be at the front desk to answer.

What it cannot settle, at any price

• Any dimension at all. A 360° photograph does not establish a measurement. Whether a doorway is wide enough for a specific chair is not answerable from a tour and we will not pretend it is.
• The gradient of a ramp, which looks gentle in a wide-angle frame more or less regardless of what it is.
• How heavy a door is, or how much force a closer puts on it.
• Whether the lift is in service today, or whether it is large enough for a powerchair and an assistant.
• The surface underfoot — how firm gravel is, how deep a pile carpet is, how slippery a floor is when wet.
• The acoustic and sensory environment. A tour has no sound unless we build one in, and even then it is one recording of one moment.
• Whether staff are available to assist, which is a question about people, not about a building.
• Today’s state of the place. The tour is true of the capture day. We deliberately do not publish capture dates, so treat everything in it as indicative rather than current.

What an extra capture pass at seated height would add

Our standard capture is at standing eye height, which is the sightline most visitors have and the wrong one for this question. What you see from a chair is a different room: what is actually visible over a reception counter, whether the lift buttons and the intercom are reachable and readable, what the mirror in a bathroom shows, how much of a corridor a hallway table takes out of the usable width.

A second pass at seated height, plus an annotation pass placing information popups on the things a visitor needs to check, is a real option we list under access information on services. It is quoted rather than sitting on the rate card, because it depends on your own access documentation, which we have to read before we can annotate anything against it.

We are going to be straightforward about the state of it: no tour published on this site carries one yet. Every one of the twelve projects on projects was captured at standing height with no access annotation layer. That is the honest position, and it is why this post describes what such a pass would add rather than showing you one.

The tour itself has to be usable

There is a second question hiding inside the first, and most of this industry answers it by not mentioning it. A tour that a disabled visitor cannot operate is not accessible information, whatever it shows.

One thing we do already, deliberately: every project page publishes its station list as plain text outside the tour embed. Forty-seven station names for the university building, seventeen for one of the hotels, twenty-two for the apart-hotel. That means somebody who cannot or does not want to operate a panning viewer can still read what is in the building, and so can a search engine. Where the source does not support it we say so rather than inventing a list — one retail tour labels all six of its stations identically, so its page publishes no list and explains why.

What we have not verified is how the tour player itself behaves under keyboard-only operation and with a screen reader. We have not tested it to a standard we would be willing to name, so we are not going to make a claim about it. If that is a requirement for your organisation — and for a public body it probably is — say so at the quote stage. We will test it against your requirement and tell you what we find in writing, including if the answer is that it does not meet it, before you spend anything.

Five questions to put to any supplier

1. At what height was the capture taken, and can you shoot a second pass at seated height?
2. Is any of the tour’s content available as text outside the embed, or is it all inside a viewer?
3. What have you actually tested for keyboard-only operation and screen readers, and will you put the result in writing?
4. Does the tour establish any dimension, and if you say yes, how was that verified?
5. On the last day, do we receive the files, so we can add access information ourselves later?

What it costs

The capture is the ordinary rate card — €40 for each of the first ten 360° photographs, €30 for each one after, a €160 minimum, VAT on top, and travel free within 25 km of Tirana. Descriptive photographs, which are useful for showing a specific fitting close up, are €10 each. The access information pass is quoted per job for the reason above. Everything published is on pricing, and every figure on this page is either from that card or counted out of a tour we delivered.

Questions people ask

Can a virtual tour replace an accessibility audit or an access statement?

No. A tour is visual evidence of what a building looked like on the day it was captured. It does not establish dimensions, gradients, door forces, surface conditions or whether equipment is currently working, and it is not produced to any accessibility standard. Publish a written access statement as well, and present the tour as an illustration of it rather than a replacement. Used that way it answers a great many questions before anybody has to ask them.

Can you measure a doorway or a ramp from the tour?

No. Nothing in a 360° photograph establishes a measurement you could rely on. A wide-angle frame in particular makes gradients and widths look different from what they are. If measurements are what matter, that is a drawn floor plan. €0.60 per square metre with a €45 minimum. Or measured drawings from somebody qualified to sign them. We would rather say that plainly than sell a walkthrough to answer a question it cannot answer.

Does the tour work with a screen reader or with keyboard-only navigation?

We have not tested it to a standard we would be prepared to name, so we will not claim that it does. What we do publish is the station list of every tour as plain text outside the embed on its project page, so the contents of a building are readable without operating a panning viewer at all. If keyboard and screen-reader support is a procurement requirement, tell us at the quote stage and we will test against your specific requirement and give you the result in writing before you commit.

What is in an access information pass?

An extra capture pass at seated height, so the tour shows what a visitor in a chair actually sees, and an annotation pass placing information markers on the things somebody needs to check — entrances, thresholds, lifts, accessible facilities and the route between them. It is quoted rather than listed on the rate card because it depends on your own access documentation, which we read first. No tour published on this site carries one yet.