Wheelchair lifts
The Sesame System provides perfect wheelchair access to buildings everywhere. To view more of our completed projects, please click here
The campaign for better wheelchair access has been around for over 50 years and only recently has there been significant progress when it comes to designing buildings that allow easy access for people in wheelchairs. Nevertheless, for existing buildings the most frequent option is to design lifts and ramps around the existing structures so that people with walking difficulties don’t have to risk their health when trying to enter a building.
In the UK, the Disability Discrimination Act (superseded by the Equality Act 2010) has encouraged the building of such ramps. Similar laws have been passed in Northern Ireland and the USA through the American Rehabilitation Act and other legislation.
Given the growing numbers of young children that are using wheelchairs due to disability, it has become imperative for schools to find ways of improving accessibility for disabled students. This has led to a great demand for ramps and rising platforms in such places.
Sesame Access Systems are working on these issues by designing wheelchair lifts that can be built into an existing staircase, thus enabling the steps to serve a dual purpose. Our wheelchair lifts are made to the customer's specifications rather than having a set template that can be produced en masse, avoiding the situation where lifts lie around waiting to be shipped off. This means that the system can designed to fit into each site specifically to give the client the best possible finish.
There are numerous issues involved with pre-fabricating a standard unit, the main issue being that there are no industry standard widths, sizes or shapes applied to staircases in front of listed buildings. Thus, these sites would not accept a pre-fabricated unit without creating hazards such as crush zones.
Institutions and galleries such as Tate Britain and Eton College have installed our wheelchair lifts with designs including retractable stairs that replace part of the entrance steps and are clad in such a way that they blend in with the existing steps. The wheelchair lifts are fitted with a gate and control post, which when pressed causes the stairs to retract and reveals a wheelchair friendly platform.
In contrast to the standard wheelchair lifts that can raise wheelchairs up and down and offer little else for convenience, Sesame’s lifts can be seen as a temporary replacement for stairs. This works due to the inclusion of a retracting staircase
Please have a look at information on our stair lift prices, or visit our projects page where you can see more examples of our ground-breaking lifts and our list of clients.