You don’t need a consultant to find your lot’s most common compliance gaps — you need a tape measure, a smartphone, and this list. Count your stalls, then your accessible stalls: the federal baseline scales from 1 accessible per 25 total, and the full table is published in the 2010 ADA Standards — if your lot has grown or been re-striped since the last count, the math may have moved without you. Find the van stall: at least one accessible stall must be van-accessible with its wider aisle and “van accessible” signage; older layouts miss this category entirely. Inspect the access aisles: full-width, fully hatched, and physically unusable for parking — an aisle a car can occupy is a violation in waiting. Check the signs, not just the paint: each accessible stall needs its vertical sign at compliant mounting height; paint-only marking fails, and California adds its own signage requirements on top. Test the slope with your phone: a level app on the stall and aisle surface tells you instantly if you’re near the strict maximums — the failure paint can’t reveal and only pavement can fix. Walk the route: roll anything with wheels from the accessible stall to your entrance; every abrupt lip, steep segment, or stretch through active vehicle traffic is a gap in the chain. Photograph everything as you go — either it becomes your punch list for the next re-stripe, or it becomes the documentation that shows good faith.

What this self-audit can’t do is certify you: formal compliance review in California is the Certified Access Specialist’s role, and findings that involve slope, ramps, or routing need construction to fix. But owners who walk this list find most of what a demand letter would have found — at tape-measure cost instead of legal cost.