Here’s a way to contribute to the two-wheelers among us: by adding useful information about wheelchair access. (And for the two-wheelers on Oppo: you probably already know about this site, but if not, I hope it helps.)
Comment from the co-founder when this was posted on Hacker News:
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/
Sadly there are a lot of challenges I never thought about previously; one of the key features of this service is the ability to identify toilets that are accessible.
The Wheelmap criteria for a wheelchair accessible toilet:
- Doorway’s inner width is minimally 90 cm (35 in)
- Clear floor space is at least 150 cm × 150 cm (59 x 59 in)
- Wheelchair-height toilet seat
- Folding grab rails (or something similar)
- Wheelchair accessible hand basin
Since it’s backed by OpenStreetMap, you can use a variety of mobile apps to contribute better data in addition to Wheelmap.org itself. (I occasionally would edit something in OSM, but the sheer volume of missing data in my city is so depressing I gave up on it. This might be motivation to do more of that.)
