A pathway audit is the practice that makes traversability visible. Ordinary auditing checks finances, compliance, and performance inside each institution — which is exactly why traversability failures go undetected, since every organization along a path can honestly report our process works while the participant experience is nearly impossible. Traversability is a property of the whole pathway, so it has to be audited that way.
A pathway audit takes a real journey — I need healthcare; I want to start a small project; I need to challenge a decision; I need to change training paths; I need to report a safety concern — and measures the number of steps, the time, the cost, the information burden, the handoffs, the failure points, the abandonment rate, the appeal clarity, and the unnecessary duplication across every institution the journey touches.
It follows the participant, not the org chart.
That makes it both directly measurable and highly actionable: it produces the traversability burden as a number, and it names the specific steps to remove. The model would make such audits mandatory for major institutions, alongside a standing presumption that accumulated barriers must keep justifying themselves. See Building and Defending It.