Wheelmap.org - A map of wheelchair accessible places | Hacker News Reader

Wheelmap.org - A map of wheelchair accessible places

wheelmap.org

228 pointsl1am072 comments

Co-founder of Wheelmap here. Great to see it mentioned! Wheelmap is 10 years old this year and has 1 Million places from OSM (and synced back) and 1.3 million places from ca 130 other sources which we aggregated as one API for others to use as well. You can find more info on https://www.accessibility.cloud/.

We also try to standardize accessibility data on https://a11yjson.org and https://www.w3.org/community/lda/

Happy to answer any questions (but have bad internet connectivity for the next few hours)

No question, just thank you! As I'm sure you know, the stress of not knowing if you'll be able to get in the front door of a restaurant or to get to the bathroom until you've already arrived is substantial - and everpresent. It is disappointing that services like Wheelmap are needed, but they absolutely are and I'm glad it's there.

You are right. Thank you!

It's very sad that such a page is needed. In some parts of the world it's not though. When we rebuilt the store I was working at 20 years ago, it wasn't even a discussion about it. Ofcourse there was a ramp to the entrance and wheelchair accessible toilet. Did a fast look around now and apparently we (Sweden) have a new law about discrimination since 2015. Stores and restaurants can't discriminate against people with different problems, they need to take resonable steps to make sure their customers has access. For example ramps up to the entrance, toilets accessible, moving smelly products to well ventilated areas and so on. This last one surpriced me though as an allergic person. Will have to talk to some stores that is spewing their perfumes around the whole shopping mall...

Much of the US is decades ahead of Canada in that regard too. (New York City being a notable exception.) We were supposed to have our own law equivalent to the Americans with Disabilities Act or what you describe, until Prime Minister Trudeau watered it down so much that it became meaningless.

I'm encouraged to hear that things are also improving in Sweden, although respectfully I'll reserve judgement about the problem being "fixed" until I hear it from a handicapped person. It's remarkable how much we overlook - I recall one disagreement with coworkers over the presence of a step to get into the restaurant they had just entered.

I'm not sure if "wheelchair accessible" and "accessible with a double stroller" fall in the same category. If they do, then Sweden is pretty wheelchair accessible.

With lots of stroller experience but no wheelchair experience, I’m pretty sure they’re different.

I can readily scale a curb or pair of steps with a stroller in a way that a wheelchair user cannot (or can only with difficulty/risk).

There are some significant differences. For example, strollers can get up a step, and you can potentially take the little passenger out and carry them and their stroller over uneven ground or up a set of steps. In a wheelchair, you don't have those kinds of options, so the availability of alternative access via ramps and lifts (elevators) is much more important.

The one big problem I have encountered with anti-discrimination laws is that sometimes they can be written too rigidly and become counter-productive.

For example, there is a well-known road full of small boutique shops, cafes, etc. in a city where I used to live. Some of those places were visibly adapted to allow things like wheelchair access, ticking all the relevant legal boxes under our disability discrimination laws. Some of them were in older buildings that couldn't easily provide the physical allowances that we'd probably design in from the start today, but they had friendly staff who were very willing to help wheelchair users or others with disabilities, and these places also seemed to be well regarded by local people who needed that help. So far, so good.

It's hard to tell exactly what happened next because there's so much hearsay with these things, but it appears that one day someone in a wheelchair decided to retain a lawyer and possibly just went along that street bringing legal actions against anywhere that wasn't absolutely compliant with the letter of the law. This posed an existential threat to some of those small businesses, even though in fact they were very disabled-friendly and often had regular customers with disabilities who were quick to come to their defence. I'm not sure how those legal actions were resolved or whether they're still ongoing, and there were some other unrelated local problems that certainly weren't making life any easier for the people running those establishments around the same time so it's hard to know whether the businesses that have closed were closed because of this. But if nothing else, this use of the legal system by apparently just one single individual has surely caused a huge amount of distress to many good people and possibly cost a lot of businesses what was for them a lot of money without necessarily making anything materially better for the people these laws were supposed to protect.

As the saying goes, this is why we can't have nice things.

This is not a problem with the anti-discrimination laws but with the justice system itself. In Sweden there is no meaning to get a lawyer and sue everyone because it won't be worth the money for the lawyer. So we do get to have nice things :-)

So how do you give effect to people's legal rights under less controversial conditions? And how do lawyers make their livings, if it's never worth hiring them? I'm confused...

You're not wrong about Canada. I was surprised that even public transit there is not guaranteed to be accessible to handicapped people. One sad example is Montreal. In fact, a couple of years ago a handicapped association in Quebec sued the Montreal public transit, but they were basically told to "piss off" by their justice system.

> until Prime Minister Trudeau watered it down so much that it became meaningless.

So the father fought against disabled people's rights and the son killed the country's aerospace sector.

What a dynasty!

I see the downvotes but I don't see any explanation!

This was Justin Trudeau. That's how far behind Canada is.

Not sure what you mean by "killing the aerospace sector", but it's very off topic, which is why you're getting downvoted. If you're referring to cancelling the F-35 procurement, that's just declining to throw good money after bad. That project was a disaster.

> This was Justin Trudeau. That's how far behind Canada is.

Wow, ok. I assumed it was the father since the ADA was discussed in congress back in the 80's.

> Not sure what you mean by "killing the aerospace sector"

Well, he went from writing a check to Lockheed to writing a check to Boeing.

But I'm talking about the Bombardier CSeries. It failed to get mainstream media coverage. It reached production and had healthy sales numbers. It was Bombardier's second clean sheet design (after the Global) to reach market and had the potential to be stretched to seat counts comparable to smaller 737 and A319.

President Trump levied tariffs on it and that's what prompted a takeover by Airbus (for 1$!). What did the Trudeau government do meanwhile to protect it -and by extension Canada's aerospace sector? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. It's crazy how he basically bowed down immediately.

https://airwaysmag.com/industry/commerce-department-sides-bo...

Hey Holgerd,

Here in Belgium, OSM-BE we will be sitting together with the 'OnWheels'-app which does pretty much the same.

They are talking about moving their database of POI, collected by their community into OSM and by improving the OSM tagging scheme at the same time. We have no idea where it'll go to, but it might be based on MapComplete (https://pietervdvn.github.io/MapComplete/index.html).

We are having a talk the 28th. Please send me a PM via OSM to 'Pieter Vander Vennet' if you are interested in joining.

I spoke with onWheels a couple of years back. Great to see they want to open up their data. Will contact you separately.

Thanks for creating this. A friend of mine has been looking for this. Great that it seems like a global initiative and not just something local.

Thanks. Wheelmap is localized in 32 languages and has places mapped in 200 countries. :)

This is fantastic but I think you need more detail on the toilets. Just because it lacks one of the features you list doesn't mean it's useless. There are relatively few accessible places in London so you can't be too choosey. I have a spinal cord injury and, for technical reasons I won't go into, basically a little privacy is enough.

I added the place in having a beer at right now. Thanks again for making this!

Thanks for adding places! Yes, we plan to change the wording regarding toilets a little bit. When people add new places, we ask some more specific questions already. We also have > 100.000 photos of places, which are mostly entrances and toilets.

Is there any plan to integrate with or produce your own wheelchair routing, and help with accessibility information for ways as well as points of interest (what WheelMap does right now).

I've moved to a smaller city; and while things are clean and generally well maintained, there are many neglected sections of sidewalks here which would not be accessible to some forms of wheelchair. I do a lot of walking so I am in a good position to gather data like this, but it seems that the effort for this is not as organized.

There are also some non-wheelchair accessibility issues in mapping between new construction and old; for example, textured pavement placed according to new standards, further back from the roadway, but the zebra crossing marks and stop lines were painted according to older standards, closer to the roadway.

I think it would be nice not only to treat this as a repository of useful information for people looking to access these ways, but as a tool to identify, triage, and resolve accessibility issues.

For OSM-only data you could set up wheelchair routing with two commands (via GraphHopper) for the region of your choice:

https://github.com/graphhopper/graphhopper#installation

In the config you specify

graph.flag_encoders: wheelchair

and enable elevation:

graph.elevation.provider: srtm

It then considers elevation and many restrictions already but it is probably not as fine tuned as it should be. We would be happy to accept improvements.

I think you need a couple more things than that, like marking excessive cross-slopes, and having a better way to mark mid-way issues. The fields definitely exist, but there's not really a focused method of entering data like this, and it's not clear to me how to do this without messing up the presentation.

wheelchair-routing is a difficult, unsolved problem IMHO. Yes you can use a profile in Graphhopper and the Heidelberg University did a large project as well.

When talking with wheelchair users I learnt that they often improvise on the routes they take, for example crossing the road even without curb-cut because it is quicker for them or trash bins blocking the sidewalk.

We plan to integrate a base layer design like https://www.accessmap.io/ which can help with basic orientation (eg. red-colored streets if they have a steep incline for example).

At the same time it would be great to have very detailed data about sidewalks in general. Apart from OSM I think this is an interesting definition: https://sharedstreets.io/

Nice! I used to work on a similar project that was probably in direct competition for research grants back then. Compared to our failed attempts what I can see on wheelmap.org seems delightfully pragmatic in how it avoids unrealistic ambition for details. We got utterly lost in stuff like e.g. measuring/describing the steepness of ramps to document the quality of accessibility features, completely ignoring the issue that someone who wanted to pretend accessibility would just conveniently forget to mention the ramp (or step) at all. Similarly, you took a deep breath and decided to restrict scope to exclude streets and sidewalks (must have been a painful decision), we never did. In hindsight it almost seems as if we actively tried to fail (we didn't), congratulations for avoiding all those pitfalls.

Thanks. Wheelmap is really minimalisitic in the number of questions, and we often get asked to extend it. It's only after we worked with all the other sources which had more detail that we start to show these. It's more difficult to map but when users add a new place we ask more questions today.

Those 1.3 million places from ~130 other sources, the website says that they are "often" with an open license. Would that be compatible with OpenStreetMap? Because then we could make OSM be a more complete map of the planet. Are you aware of any project that can show which places (from those other open sources) are not yet tagged on OSM?

Edit: to clarify, I'm not proposing an import (which is usually a hassle), but just a comparison to explore how many places are in open data but currently not in OSM.

Some sources are open-licensed (which we provide right away when you use our API), and some only agreed to share with Wheelmap (for example Foursquare, HERE Maps, and others). We would love to see the license-compatible places in OSM as well but agree that a mass import is not the right way.

Appreciate your work. It's not easy to collect plenty data to become useful.

Just wanted to highlight from the FAQ:

Who owns the map's data?

Wheelmap is based largely on the free world map OpenStreetMap which stores all the data. The data sets are published under the Open Database License (ODbL) and are available to everyone and can be used free of charge. On the service https://www.accessibility.cloud/ , which is the technical backend of Wheelmap.org, more data is shown, provided by partners with varying licences. Sozialhelden e.V. merely incorporates this data into the map.

It's really good to see a project like this open up it's data for sharing and re-use.

> It's really good to see a project like this open up it's data for sharing and re-use.

Wheelmap mostly a front for OpenStreetMap; it doesn’t own any data.

Many community mapping projects have a big button saying "Add information" - like this one does - but not many make sure the data goes somewhere Open. So credit to the creators.

And if someone want to contribute to OpenStreetMap then https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete is likely a good fit (if you are interested in wheechair quests - you need to enable them in settings)

I just happened to have discovered this website last week as well after sharing data on whether places I visited are wheelchair accessible as well using https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete.

I'd highly recommend everyone with an Android device to install that app. And if you're in e.g. a restaurant, take a look around, whip out StreetComplete, and mark the place as wheelchair accessible or not.

That's awesome! Just installed :)

I love StreetComplete but I wish it was faster at discovering nearby quests, it can take many minutes if you are in a new area and have many quest types active.

Westnordost has been actively working on this the last few days, and talking about it in the OSMUS Slack. The query times are down to a fraction of what they've been, so assuming it all scales well, I'd expect the changes to be in a new version of StreetComplete very soon.

To be more specific, works happens in https://github.com/westnordost/StreetComplete/pull/1901

Yes, these contributions will show up on Wheelmap as well, thanks!

Note that wheelchair quests are disabled by default, you need to go into settings to enable them.

We used to do pub crawls where we were only allowed to go to not yet tagged places and tag them. We managed to do around 20 places an evening with a few people (we split up some times).

Nice and fun activity to help people. Before Corona at least...

That's a brilliant idea. I wonder if I can convince people to join me on that, if pubs ever re-open.

We found that "mapping events" as we call it are a very suitable group activity with social distancing. The virtual event connects the people who go out separately to map the accessibility of places.

I’m a sporty guy, but 8/9 years ago I broken both my legs and used a wheelchair for more than 2 months. Only when you try what this mean you can understand the difficulty! And every new initiative like this website, is a great thing.

Not nearly the same; But at university I was one of those guys driving around on an Airwheel. Every little curb was sooo annoying, and I could just jump off, walk over and continue my ride. Sometimes I would do quite some detours to avoid that. Made me realize how annyoing going around on campus in a wheelchair must have been.

As a summer-job 30 years ago I was working with moving stuff around the university. We had wagons to drag the stuff around everywhere. Everything was very accessible, you can even get between the buildings without stepping outside thanks to tunnels above or below ground. Elevators or long slopes where there is need. The local university is a relatively new one, about 55 years old so I guess it was planned from the beginning.

Amazing. I am ashamed to say, but I was somewhat ignorant to issues of accessibility, and not just for those in wheelchairs.

A partially sighted friend asked me; "do you think I'd be able to walk that trail?" Despite it being somewhat technical, I didn't fully grasp his limitations. Long story short, it was a bit of a disaster when we tried it together.

We're in the middle of working on projects using panoramic imagery + computer vision + OSM to grade UK trails and their accessibility. The idea being show, don't tell.

I'm going to send an email via your contact form. I would really appreciate the opportunity to ask you a few questions.

sure, please contact me and my team here: https://news.wheelmap.org/en/contact/

It gets hard quick to answer these questions because each disability is unique. I once knew a woman get out of her wheelchair and walk up 3 stairs. She needed help to make that walk but she was able to do it (don't tell her doctor) . Others could not do that walk at all.

A term I've used is "ambulatory wheelchair user" - there are lots of us!

I think it's more important to have the information available. I might not go to a place with a step at the entrance by myself but if I have people with me I can decide that I'll risk it.

Even beyond being unique, disabilities are usually designated with cliffs rather than a gradient. People with an ambulatory disability are lumped in as "can walk with cane", "can walk with walker", or "cannot walk, must use wheelchair" ignoring the fact that some people exist on boundaries, or might oscillate between two depending on what they're doing or how they're feeling.

It seems like it would be nice to have a better classification system for the challenges a particular terrain poses. While having videos to see what the trail looks like is definitely a step up, it seems like a pain in the ass to have to watch someone walk it (and it would ruin a bit of the wonder for me, personally). I wonder if it's possible to condense the terrain down to a series of "potentially problematic features". I'm not an expert in accessibility, so I don't know what exactly one would flag, but things that come to mind would be rough terrain (inaccessible by typical wheelchair, accessible by ruggedized wheelchair), rough terrain (inaccessible by any wheelchair), non-smooth terrain (debris on trail could trip someone, accessible by any wheelchair), gradient in excess of X%, whether the trail is shared with bicyclists, etc.

I do worry about the data the operator would have access to, though. And even if we assume the operator is above reproach, I would worry that hackers would get access to the data. It's not something that I would want to host personally, just because of the risk of causing harm if the data were to be stolen.

I work on architectural design teams around the US and wanted to let everyone know that the ADA Act compels us to think deeply and equitably about accessibility in our buildings, practically as much as fire design. Often renovations are deemed too costly or scaled back in scope when considering what is required for accessibility.

A newer requirement for ADA is in live music venues where patrons are expected to be standing during the performance. Accommodations are to be made for wheel chairs to be elevated and able to see the performance in amongst the crowd, not relegated to a corner of the room.

It is quite apparent how poor access for wheel chairs is in central London since it is so rare to see anyone using a wheelchair around the streets.

This was all the more apparent with when the Paralympics was on in London and I’d see far more wheelchairs users emboldened to be out and about. I’d like to see them feel at ease all of the time.

It takes a really dogged personality for someone to commute into London via the accessible stations. When (if) Crossrail opens I trust access will be easier.

For some reason I feel quite strongly about this.

I can imagine this even has an amplifying effect. As the reasoning of e.g. a shopkeeper, or pub-owner now is "there are hardly any wheelchairs about, so why bother investing in a ramp/accessible utilities etc".

Any public business has to be wheelchair accessible in the US, otherwise the business faces being sued under the ADA. Is there no equivalent law in the EU?

Any new construction or substantial renovation has to be wheelchair accessible in the EU. There are exceptions for historic sites I believe.

A lot of disability discrimination is handled at a national rather than EU level, because EU law is pretty narrowly constrained by the treaties and the purpose of the EU.

In the UK, there's a "duty to make reasonable adjustments" if "a provision, criterion or practice [...] puts a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage" (s20 Equality Act 2010).

But there's quite a wide margin when it comes to what is or isn't a "reasonable" adjustment.

Lots of historic buildings are never going to be fully accessible without a massive rebuild project. The cost of retrofitting, say, the London Underground to be fully wheelchair accessible would easily reach into the tens of billions. (New capital projects tend to have accessibility baked in—so the DLR, built in the 80s, is extremely accessible, as is the renovated bits of the Jubilee Line, and Crossrail will be.)

The "reasonable adjustments" don't necessarily need to be providing physical access adjustments like ramps/lifts. For instance, when I was in university, one of the students on my course was in a wheelchair, and they relocated all lectures, tutorials and seminars he was in to ensure they were all in the rooms that were wheelchair accessible.

There is some EU legislation that tries to unify accessibility rules across the different countries though. https://ec.europa.eu/social/main.jsp?catId=1202

"reasonable adjustments" I hate these subjective laws, it's wide open for manipulation of whoever has the bigger stick. As harsh as it may sound, they should state that every building, no matter how old, needs to be accessible.

There's ways for the government to specify in more detail what does and does not amount to a reasonable adjustment through secondary legislation covering specific industries, building regulations, and so on.

Almost all the most important laws have some subjectivity and interpretation built into them. If they didn't, we'd get conceptual clarity at the cost of some pretty horrible injustices.

What's a public business? You don't mean publicly traded companies right?

They meant “public accommodation”. Essentially any place in America that’s not a church or members’ club, regardless of whether the ownership is private, public, or government.

Okay, thanks!

Isn't that in the US also tied to a minimum employee count?

I'm not American, but follow a few people on Twitter and you'll see the ADA leaves a lot to be desired.

Just to point out (as a mobility scooter user) that it's not simply building accessibility that is an issue, but also the presence of drop-kerbs on sidewalks so you can get across roads; though cataloguing all of those would be a real headache, but I do spend a lot of time getting stuck when my usual route is closed for things like tree-felling, and the other side of the road is not accessible.

OpenStreetMap's working on mapping those, though as you expected, it's taking a while.

My daughter needs a hoist and we’ve used https://www.uktoiletmap.org/

This should be in Google maps, and integrated with its navigation tools.

Note that this is OpenStreetMap data, available under open license.

As soon as Google complies with https://www.openstreetmap.org/copyright they can integrate it.

Google made an ad for Google Chrome https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EulA50zMWj4

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