David Wästerfors

This chapter analyses volunteer work for identifying and reporting accessibility faults in urban settings. By looking closely at how people monitor adherence to the accessibility standards of laws and human rights, it is possible to recognise and understand their concrete fight against exclusion and discrimination. The author uses ethnographic data from go-alongs with two ‘accessibility detectives’ in Sweden to describe their techniques, emotions and personal involvement in fault-finding. The practices that come to the surface help us explain accessibility and resistance to it in a less ‘boxy’ way. Accessibility is not something one can get done with once and for all, and it does not only take place in official documents. Rather, it depends on a processual and emerging set of practiced discrimination-sensitivities in situ. Detecting the spots and situations where accessibility actually fails in society is a policy-informed yet flexible activity, frustrating for those involved but also engaging.