The Setup #

You’ve installed GoodMaps. You’ve briefed your team. A natural next step is to invite a colleague who has a disability or someone from the local disability community to explore the space and share their experience. Their lived experience and familiarity with your venue make their feedback genuinely valuable.

That feedback is an excellent starting point, but it shouldn’t be the finish line. Relying on one person’s experience as your only check will always leave you with an incomplete picture of your venue’s true accessibility.

Why Testing Is a Different Skill #

When you ask someone to test your navigation system, you are asking them to do more than simply use it:

• Describe how it works for them personally
• Consider how it might work for people with different disabilities and confidence levels
• Sense‑check it against wider accessibility expectations and standards

Learning theory describes a progression from not yet recognizing what we don’t know, through deliberate learning, to expert, almost automatic performance, often called the four stages of competence model. Most people you invite – whether with a disability or not – are highly skilled at navigating their own environments. However, they may be at a much earlier stage when it comes to formal accessibility testing, simply because they have never been trained for it. Additionally, their orientation and mobility (O&M) skills are often individualized rather than standardized, which means assumptions can easily obscure broader insights.

This is normal. Accessibility User Acceptance Testing (UAT) is a specialized practice with its own methods, checklists, and documentation, including defined test plans, scripts, findings logs, and summary reports. Expecting any one person, however capable as a traveller, to cover that whole discipline alone is asking them to operate outside their training.

The Psychology of “It Works for Me” #

Studies in cognitive psychology show that people can unintentionally overestimate how broadly their own experience applies, especially when they have not seen systematic feedback from a wider group. The Dunning–Kruger literature, for example, describes how people with limited experience in a specific task can be unaware of the limits of their own perspective because the skills needed to perform well are also needed to judge performance accurately.

In accessibility, this can surface as everyday comments such as:

• “The audio prompts are clear” (for someone who processes language quickly)
• “The route is straightforward” (for someone who knows your building extremely well)

Both statements are true for that individual – and that truth matters. The risk is not that they are wrong; the risk is treating their experience as if it fully represents users with different disabilities, familiarity levels, or stressors. That is where false confidence can creep in.

What Professional Testing Adds #

Professional accessibility and UAT specialists are trained to work deliberately at the conscious competence stage: they bring structured methods and shared standards to what might otherwise remain informal impressions. In practice, that means they can:

• Design and run multi‑user test plans that intentionally cover different disability profiles, familiarity with the venue, and technology comfort levels
• Use established frameworks and guidelines to assess accessibility and compliance, rather than relying on personal preference alone
• Interpret individual comments as data points in a larger pattern, distinguishing venue‑specific friction from broader accessibility gaps

GoodMaps itself has been shaped by feedback from hundreds of users across multiple disability groups, gathered through structured testing processes. Professional involvement helps align any local testing you do with this broader evidence base, so you benefit from both large‑scale patterns and venue‑specific insight.

Using Local Insight in a Scientific Way #

The aim is not to choose between science and lived experience but to connect them:

• Start with a professionally configured map and routes grounded in recognized accessibility practice and the collective feedback gathered during GoodMaps’ development.
• Invite local disabled people to use the system in your real environment, and treat their feedback as high‑value qualitative data. Compensate them appropriately; this is research input, not casual opinion.
• Treat each person’s experience as one data point within a larger dataset. Ask: does this align with what is known from broader testing, or does it highlight something unique about this venue’s layout, signage, or traffic patterns?
• Re‑engage professionals when you make significant changes to your space, to check that accumulated configuration and local feedback still add up to robust accessibility.

In this model, your one person (or small group) is not being positioned as unqualified. They are positioned where they belong in a scientifically informed process: as crucial sources of lived, local evidence whose insights are most powerful when combined with structured methods, shared standards, and the accumulated experience of many other users.