The Senso accessibility certificate, explained

If you have found your way here, you have probably seen a Senso certificate — or you are wondering whether to trust one. This page explains exactly what the Senso accessibility certificate can tell you, how it is produced, and, just as importantly, what it cannot know. We think the second half is the more useful half.

What the Senso accessibility certificate shows

The certificate works like an EPC, because everyone already knows how to read an EPC: a banded verdict at the top, and the detail underneath.

For each key feature of the property, the certificate gives a verdict and a reason in plain English:

Each verdict says why: "two steps visible at the front door, no handrail" tells you something you can act on, where "poor access" would not. Specifics matter in this territory — a threshold of just 15mm can stop a wheelchair, which is why the certificate deals in observations rather than adjectives.

How the certificate is produced

Senso reads the same evidence you would: the listing photos and the floorplan. It runs, automatically, the same detective work a careful buyer does by hand — checking the entrance shots for steps, the floorplan for an entrance-level bathroom, the hallways for turning space — and writes up what it finds as a report.

That is the whole trick, and it is also the honest limit: the analysis only knows what the listing shows. Senso does not visit the property, and it never claims to have measured something a photo cannot show.

What the certificate cannot know

A listing is a curated set of photographs, so there will always be things no analysis of it can establish:

• The exact height of a threshold photographed from above
• The width of a doorway that never appears in a photo
• Rooms the photographer skipped, or shot from one flattering angle
• The gradient of the path or driveway
• Anything behind a closed door

Where the evidence runs out, the certificate says so, feature by feature. It will tell you "insufficient evidence — no photo shows the rear door threshold" rather than rounding a guess up to a verdict.

Why "insufficient evidence" is deliberate

Anyone who has searched for an accessible home has been burned by confident labels. One wheelchair user on the Scope forum described "one 'wheelchair accessible' studio apartment that was a joke — only one door was accessible... counters and everything full height". A reader of the Simply Emma blog put the same experience more bluntly: "too often they say it is accessible if you can get in the door".

A tool that guessed would simply join that noise. So Senso does the opposite: when a certificate comes back with a low band or a set of "insufficient evidence" verdicts, that is not the analysis failing — it is the moment you can trust it. It means the remaining verdicts on the page are backed by something visible, and the gaps are honestly labelled. The gaps are useful in their own right, too: each one is a precise question to email the agent before you decide to travel.

What Senso is not

Three things the certificate never replaces:

• It is not a survey. No one visits the property, and nothing is physically measured.
• It is not an OT assessment. If you are planning adaptations, an occupational therapist assesses what you need in a home — Senso assesses what a listing shows. The two are complements, not substitutes.
• It does not replace a viewing. It tells you which viewings are worth your time and what to check when you get there.

It is a triage tool, built for a market where only 13% of homes in England have the four basic accessibility features. When accessible homes are that scarce, the expensive mistake is not missing a listing — it is spending your energy on twenty viewings that fail at the front door.

How people use it

The pattern we see most often is triage: run the shortlist through Senso, let the certificates rule out the properties with visible barriers, and spend your viewing energy on the two or three that survive. Because the certificate is a page rather than a hunch, it is easy to share — adult children searching on behalf of a parent in another city use it to agree, as a family, which properties justify the trip. And the "insufficient evidence" items become the exact questions to send the agent before booking. If you are still building that shortlist, start with how to find a wheelchair accessible home in the UK.

Senso is free. Paste a Rightmove listing link at wearesenso.com and the certificate takes a few minutes.