Accessibility and Monitoring: The Cornerstones of Playground Success

This is your biweekly dose of playground knowledge from someone who's spent 20 years inspecting them.

In this issue, I’ll talk about the importance of accessibility and how it can affect playgrounds.

I’ll also discuss how many playground owners miss opportunities to improve the safety of their space by not keeping adequate records.

All that and more lies ahead in The Playground Post.

In a nutshell, accessibility is what ensures people with disabilities can navigate the world in a safe and independent manner.

For all playgrounds, accessibility is a must, but it means different things in different contexts. For instance, I’ve worked with organizations specifically geared towards kids with special needs, and those playgrounds end up looking different than ones for a public elementary school.

Still, every playground has to have a base level of accessibility. Not only because it’s the law, but because every kid deserves to play. And the great thing about designing your playground around accessibility is that it helps to foster a sense of inclusion for every child.

Too often, when kids who use wheelchairs, crutches, or other mobility devices try to navigate playgrounds, they feel like they’re on the outside looking in. This is especially true when the most common equipment they encounter are like conventional swings, climbers, and slides. 

But amenities like wheelchair ramps, transfer stations, and ground-level activity panels allow kids with disabilities to experience just as much of the playground as their peers. Including these on your playground helps kids feel included and enables them to play without impediment. This is what I mean by inclusion and accessibility; the former is something that kids feel, and the latter is the thing that makes them feel it.

And when you start homing in on accessibility standards, you start to get a better, more well-rounded sense of what playground safety entails. Accessibility, inclusion, and safety are the cornerstones of proper playground design, and someone who knows what they’re doing will focus on all three.

We’re fully in the back-to-school portion of the calendar year, and if you run a playground, chances are it’ll start seeing a lot of use. Even if you’ve recently gotten your playground inspected, it’s a good idea to continually monitor your playground’s surfacing.

If you have rubber poured-in-place surfacing, keep an eye out for any cracks in the floor. If you use loose-fill surfacing like rubber mulch, do a weekly check for proper surfacing depth and refill problematic areas as needed.

Whether it’s in front of swings, directly below overhead climbers, or around transfer stations, make sure to examine the highest-trafficked places around your playground, as these will often need closer attention paid than other areas.

For more detailed criteria as well as a free weekly inspection dashboard, click here:

If you operate one or more playgrounds, you’ll know that accidents are inevitable. One of the many facts of life is that kids will run too fast, fall down, and hurt themselves, and perhaps nowhere is this truer than on a playground.

That said, I think there’s something to be gleaned from every accident that occurs on the playground. Whether it’s a fall from a deck or someone tripping over a loose tree branch, every data point is worth looking at from an analytical standpoint.

After all, if you can identify patterns in location and frequency of accidents, you’re in a better position to remedy underlying issues like insufficient surfacing depth and common landing points for debris.

On the other hand, many of those who run playgrounds aren’t really keeping track of safety incidents. And when they do make changes after a kid hurts themselves, often these only come after something major like a broken arm.

In short, there’s no learning, only reacting. When organizations approach playground safety with reactivity instead of proactivity, all they’re doing is ensuring that future incidents continue happening. In the end, no learning or self-reflection occurs, and kids are less safe as a result.

In order to truly learn from experiences, you have to approach them with the attitude that learning should occur. Rather than write off a twisted ankle or a scraped shin as an outlier, make sure you record the events preceding them, along with all other safety-related concerns. Your future playground visitors will thank you.

If you’re looking to purchase a playground, ask yourself:

These are the sorts of questions that sometimes prove necessary to make playground plans come to life.

If you have any questions on how to get your playground to the finish line, reply to this email and I’ll give you my take.

A playground is a big purchase, and when it comes to completing a project, there’s no such thing as a dumb question.

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Talk soon,

Nic Breedlove

Certified Playground Safety Inspector

20 years in the game. Still learning.