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Comment by holgerd | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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.

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...

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.

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.

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. :)

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/

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