Approach · How is it made · Accessible version
Six moves, one access decision
All content is presented in reading order, with no diagram or scripting. Each move asks one question, states what happens, names what it prevents, and says who holds it. The six moves are the sequence by which an access decision is reached with the person it is for, and the point at which what one decision reveals becomes a question about the environment. The interactive version presents the same six moves as a selectable sequence.
Move 1 of 6 · Held by the learner
Listen first
What is the task, and where does it stop them?
What happens
The learner describes the course, the assessment, the placement or the lab in front of them, and the specific place where the way it is currently done stops them. What can be shared, with whom, and for how long is agreed here, before anything is written down. Documentation is read afterwards, for functional impact in this environment, and the request for it is limited to what the decision needs — a letter that confirms function is often enough, and a diagnosis is often not required. If a need is already clear, an interim arrangement goes in place at this move.
What it prevents
A diagnosis standing in for a person; a term lost while paperwork is pending.
Move 2 of 6 · Held by the program
Establish what is essential
What must they still demonstrate, and who says so?
What happens
With the people who teach it: what must a learner be able to demonstrate, and which parts of the current method are tradition, timetable or default. The question is put the way the law puts it — rationally connected to the outcome, held in good faith, reasonably necessary — and the answer is written and confirmed by the program, because it is theirs to hold and theirs to defend. Where a program has never written its essential requirements down, this move produces the first draft, and that draft outlives the case.
What it prevents
"We have always done it this way" standing as a requirement; the burden of proof landing on the learner.
Move 3 of 6 · Held by the practitioner, with the program
Design the options
What could change for everyone, and what for this person?
What happens
From the environment outward. First, what could change for everyone — a format, a setting, a way of showing the same thing — because a change at that level removes the next request as well as this one. Then what this person needs in this environment that the environment cannot yet supply. Each option is checked against the construct being assessed, so that an accommodation stays an accommodation. More than one route where more than one works; where only one works and it carries a real cost, the cost is quantified and external funding is looked for before anyone says the word hardship.
What it prevents
The same request arriving next term; a modification passed off as an accommodation; hardship claimed on a guess.
Move 4 of 6 · Held by the learner
Decide at a gate, with the learner
Which option, and on what terms?
What happens
The learner sees the options, asks what they need to ask, and chooses. The decision, its reasons, its scope and its limits go into one document in plain language, with the route for asking that it be reviewed and by whom. It does not proceed until the learner has read it.
What it prevents
An arrangement nobody chose and nobody uses; a decision whose reasons left with the person who made it.
Move 5 of 6 · Held by everyone named in the record
Put it in place and check it
Who does what by when, and when do we look again?
What happens
Each party has a task and a date. In a university that means the registrar, the exam centre, the teaching assistant, the placement coordinator, the residence office and the supervisor as well as the instructor — an arrangement is real only once it has survived all of them, and the record names who holds each piece. The check happens at a set point in the term, before the first assessment the decision affects, and what it finds changes the arrangement while the change can still reach the person already in the course. The check asks one question about the course as well: has anything built for this learner since been built in for everyone, so that the next learner does not have to ask?
What it prevents
An arrangement that exists on paper; a problem found after the grade is in; a fix that stays individual when it could have become the default.
Move 6 of 6 · Held by the practitioner, and handed to the institution
Record the pattern
What does this case say about the next one?
What happens
Each decision is a written record that can be read by anyone who needs it and by no one who does not. Read across cases, with identifying detail removed, the records show which barriers recur — and a barrier that recurs across four courses is a design question for the program, not four accommodations. It becomes a consultation with the department, a proposal to the body that governs curriculum, or a line in the institution's accessibility plan. The log also counts what the records cannot show on their own: whether requests of that kind fell once a barrier was designed out, and who never asked at all, since most learners who had support at school never ask again once they leave it. That is where Fieldwork, the research method, and the three engagements begin.
What it prevents
Four accommodations where one design change would do; a service that is busy forever; a service that counts only the people who asked.
The grounding for each move is in the reference list on the Approach page at Accessible Learning Labs.