I’ve recently been taking on more tagging for wheelchair accessibility in my neighbourhood. It’s been one of those “you don’t see it until you think to look for it” kinds of things. I’m not disabled myself, so I never thought to consider the heights of steps (until I tripped on them.) Now that I look for them, I must freak out other people around me as they see me stare at my foot to see whether a step is ankle high or not.

There were a couple things I came to think about while mapping that I could not seem to find answers for in the wiki. A lot of the time, I just answer the question with the framework of “I’ve seen places do these things, so I will treat them as the standard and anything that falls under that bar is limited or not accessible.” I would be curious for others thoughts on them.

• Do establishments need powered doors to be accessible?

Here in Regina (and a lot of Canada, these were extremely common back in Ontario), doors have buttons that you can press to swing the door open mechanically. They have a wheelchair icon on them most of the time, so they are clearly marked as an accessibility feature.

While common, they are not ubiquitous. In my mapping practice, if a place does not have at least one powered door, I label it as limited wheelchair accessibility at maximum. My logic is that even if a door could be physically be opened manually by a patron in a wheelchair (as in, they can open the door and have enough space on the platform outside to maneuver while doing it – I have seen places where the platform is elevated and small enough that you would fall off trying to do so), they shouldn’t have to do that while the option of powered doors exists.

… See full entry

I’ve been using StreetComplete for the past few days now. It’s great fun, but I often run into questions where I’m thinking “Well… I don’t know that any of these options are right.” (Or “If Regina wasn’t a uniquely hot mess, then maybe one of these answers would actually work!” I’m looking at you Albert street rail crossing.) The tagging and questionable-edits channels on the osm-world discord have been massive helps.

It isn’t until you start tagging out in the wild that you start coming up with weird questions that you wouldn’t have thought up otherwise. Like:

• Do you mark an intersection as having no marked lanes? (Are they even supposed to have marked lanes if they aren’t turn lanes?)
• Is a concrete block coloured red a form of tactile paving, even if it has no different texture to it from any other block?
• How far does a street light have to be from a bus stop before you can say that bus stop is unlit at night?
• If there are no sidewalks next to a road and there is no way for a pedestrian to walk along the side (like if it’s too much of a slope), are they allowed to walk on the road?
  • (I don’t think I’ve seen a sign telling pedestrians that they aren’t allowed to in these situations here, but I don’t know anyone who would even want to in the places where it happens.)
• Why does Regina have so many pedways over streets cars drive under, and none of them are marked with a maximum height sign?
  • (It’s probably because in those areas, trucks aren’t allowed. But I never even noticed they didn’t have the signs until I thought to look!)