Swim Ireland, in partnership with Active Disability Ireland, St. Michael’s House, Dublin City Council and Ireland Active have developed an accessibility audit tool for swimming pools, called Swim Access. The tool is a digital assessment of the full experience a person with a disability has when visiting a swimming pool. This includes advance research on the pool’s website, accessibility of the external and internal environments in and around the pool and using the pool itself.
The purpose of the project is to provide real-time feedback to swimming pools on accessibility, support swimming pools to improve accessibility, encourage people with a disability to visit their local swimming pools, and ultimately increase the usage of swimming pools by people with a disability.
The Swim Access project was funded by Sport Ireland Dormant Accounts, and the tool was developed in partnership with Access Earth. Central to the development of the tool were people with a disability, with a team of four from St. Michael’s House involved in the project from the outset. Stephanie, Martin, Charlotte and Aisling are swimmers, assessors, and potential customers who are conscious of their health and want to find a facility that they can use on an ongoing basis throughout their lives.
Through focus group work, they co-designed Swim Access, completed training on how to use the tool, providing feedback throughout to ensure future training is fully accessible, and are currently piloting Swim Access in three Dublin City swimming pools. Once the assessments have been completed the assessors have been providing feedback to pool managers, with a detailed written report prepared by Access Earth.
Looking to the future, the project group intend to apply for additional project funding to expand the project nationally, and to create a simplified version for swimming pools who wish to receive ongoing feedback from users with a disability or additional support needs, on completion of a full Swim Access assessment.
St. Michael’s House is proud to partner on this exciting and important project. The Swim Access Project reflects our strategic goals of promoting inclusion, supporting independence and improving access to meaningful community participation for people with disabilities.
Sarah Hewitt, Activity Hub, Sport and Leisure Centre Manager at St. Michael’s House, said:
“We are delighted to collaborate on the Swim Access initiative. Ensuring that our/all swimming environments are genuinely accessible is essential in empowering people with disabilities to enjoy sport, recreation and wellbeing on their own terms. This project not only highlights barriers but helps us solve them and we are very proud to be part of that progress.”