Access Guide
Purpose
- to provide information for disabled people, their families and carers to help them make best use of facilities within Midlothian
- to help avoid wasted time and effort going somewhere only to find access difficult or impossible
- to encourage shopkeepers and managers of premises to improve provision for the disabled
- much is about mobility, but sensory impairments, autism, dementia, learning disabilities, mental illness and a whole lot more can inhibit people from using shop and recreational facilities
- disabled people do not like the unknown - for some it can be frightening, for others it is just frustrating
How it works
There are basically two pages : SEARCH and RESULTS, plus another which gives a key to the symbols used.
Search
There are five fields. If you enter part of a word in the first three it will find anything that matches (eg 'pic' in the name field will find 'Hospice' and 'Spice'; 'eh26' in the postcode - anything in Penicuik), but if you put 'Loanhead Masonic Hall' in the name ad 'Pen' in the town it would find nothing.
The other two are slightly different. There are 5 main categories, select one of these and a list of sub-categories appears below. It's difficult to work out where some items should be, so if you don't see what you want, go back and choose a different main categoy. An alternative is to leave the sub-category blank to get all the items in the main category.
If you just click on 'submit' without filling in anything, you get the lot - at the moment there are fewer than 50 entries, but later that will not be useful.