Access Israel — Disability-Led Mystery-Shopper Accessibility Audits

Access Israel was established in 1999 as the first Israeli non-profit organisation dedicated to accessibility and inclusion, working in a country where an estimated 1.6 million people — about 18% of the population — live with a disability.

Since around 2018 the organisation has run a mystery-shopper accessibility testing programme: teams typically include a tester who is blind, one with a hearing disability, one who uses a wheelchair and one with a non-visible disability, who covertly assess a business or public service's physical and digital accessibility. By 2021 the programme had completed more than 300 paid assessments, priced between €200 and €550 depending on scope, with many client organisations repeating the assessment annually or twice a year to track progress.

Access Israel also runs an Accessibility Training Center that trains municipal and business staff to deliver accessible face-to-face, phone, internet and event services, and the organisation is listed as an innovative practice in the Zero Project disability-inclusion database and as a World Economic Forum partner organisation.

Caution: the fee-based assessment model (€200–550 per audit) may put repeated testing out of reach for smaller businesses, and the 300-plus assessment count is reported by Access Israel itself; external corroboration here comes from third-party award/registry listings (Zero Project, WEF) rather than an independent audit of that figure.

Read the full analysis: https://aisrael.org/en/