Wheelmap: the wheelchair accessibility crowdsourcing platform

Wheelmap - a map for wheelchair-accessible places is an initiative of the Sozialhelden, a grassroots organisation from Berlin, Germany. On Wheelmap¹ everyone from all over the world can find and add places and rate them by using a traffic light system. The map, which is available since 2010, shall help wheelchair users and people with mobility impairments to plan their day more effectively. Currently, more than 800,000 cafés, libraries, swimming pools, and many more public places have been captured. While the majority of the places which have been added so far are located in Germany, the mapping platform works globally, as it is based on OpenStreetMap (OSM). The Wheelmap interface is available in Arabic, Danish, German, Greek, English, Spanish, French, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Swedish, Turkish, Korean, and Polish.

Wheelchairs or purpose-built cars on the one hand, elevators and ramps on the other allow people with mobility impairments to plan their day independently to a great extent. But frequently, the last meters decide whether the trip to the cinema, beer garden or supermarket was worth the effort. Just one single step at the entrance can be an insurmountable obstacle, and this is where Wheelmap comes into play. Users provide information for other users on how accessible a destination is. Thereby, the map contributes to an active and diversified lifestyle for wheelchair users. People with rollators or buggies benefit from this tool as well. Furthermore, the aim of Wheelmap is to make owners of wheelchair-inaccessible public places aware of the problem. They should be encouraged to reflect on and improve the accessibility of their premises.

As mentioned earlier, Wheelmap is based on OpenStreetMap, an open, editable map of the digital open source map of the world. Everyone can search for places and – provided they have been tagged – get information about how easily accessible the places are. Those who sign up as a user are able to add and rate new places. An easy traffic light system marks the wheelchair accessibility of a place: Green signifies an unrestricted access – e.g. because there are no steps or there is a permanent ramp, an elevator or other tools which allow the entrance. Places which are orange-colored have no toilets but might have a foldable ramp for example. Places which are red-colored are not accessible for wheelchair users. In general, the more people join Wheelmap and add places the more precise and informative the map gets.

Sozialhelden is an incorporated, not for profit society, located in Berlin, Germany. In addition to a small paid staff, it comprises a network of volunteers engaging in various activities regarding social justice. It is financed by taking part in contests, by receiving donations from public and private sponsors, and by supporting Wheelmap-related activities of social engagement.

The main objective is to gather information about the accessibility of public places (points of interest, POI). Everyone is invited to participate and provide their own tagging of places on an OSM-based map at the Wheelmap website.

In the past decade, OpenStreetMap in particular, and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) in general, have gained special attention in various research projects. Such free and open datasets have been used in several application domains including routing and navigation [1–4], transportation studies [5, 6], urban and environmental challenges [7, 8], as well as disaster management [9].

So far, several efforts have been done regarding research studies specifically addressing accessibility issues using crowdsourced datasets. This is while there are still research gaps in developing an efficient framework for accessible transportation. For instance, in one of the early works, Prandi et al., [10] explored the potentials of the crowdsourcing communities in improving data access and services in the field of disable pedestrian mobility. Similar works have been followed by [11–19]. Among those, mPASS [19] presents a valuable mobile pervasive accessibility social sensing framework. mPASS collects data about urban and building accessibility to provide personalized paths. Their framework is similar to Wheelmap, besides the fact that Wheelmap only focuses on accessible points of interests (building, toilets, etc.), while mPASS also considers accessible routes. In another study, Salomoni et, al. [16] present the results of field trials with mobile applications that employing different gamification mechanisms. The authors conclude that some of the apps are able to drive users to provide more contributions. Further discussions on their study can be found at [16].

A main concern regarding using crowdsourced datasets such as OpenStreetMap is the level of quality they carry [20]. Several methods exists in assessing VGI data quality [21]. Among the studies carried out on using VGI data for urban accessibility, some of them evaluate, argue and enrich the fitness for purpose of this data source [22–24]. For instance, Mobasheri et, al. [23] evaluates the completeness of sidewalk information (as well as other relevant data for accessibility) in OpenStreetMap database and discusses the lack of data completeness with applying extrinsic and intrinsic data analysis. Wheelmap, among other possibilities, can be used by volunteers to enrich accessibility information in OpenStreetMap. Wheelmap has had a great influence in research projects. Several studies have used or cited Wheelmap as one of the main crowdsourcing platforms in the accessibility domain [18, 19, 25–31]. Hence, this study aims to introduce this platform for a better understanding and usage in future studies.

This article presents the framework and functionalities of Wheelmap – one of the promising existing platforms for the mobility impaired. Since its first release, Wheelmap has gained great interest and attention by the accessibility communities. Nowadays, Wheelmap has become the world’s most extensive database on wheelchair accessible places; a database with more than 800,000 points of interest which have been rated by an active community gathered around the project. The Wheelmap project is one of several projects being run by a team at the non-profit organisation Sozialhelden. In order to ensure that this ambitious idea could grow into a successful project, Wheelmap’s activity was designed for scalability from the very beginning. The Wheelmap team has won numerous national and international prizes. Among those are the Deutscher Bürgerpreis 2010 and World Summit Award Mobile 2012 by United Nations. It also received the Vodafone Accessibility Award 2011 from Neelie Kroes, formerly European Commissioner for Digital Agenda.