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.

There are also problems where these exterior doors use door closers as a fire prevention feature – but those closers are set up improperly and close too fast. So if you’re trying to open a door manually while trying to enter with a wheelchair, you have a door slamming into you and pushing you into the frame (which I have seen happen a few times.)

• Do we evaluate accessibility at the POI feature level, or in context?

I am running into an issue where I am mapping out the accessibility of a local mall. The individual stores are accessible on their own: they have wide aisles, there are no steps, and everything is at an appropriate height. But the mall itself has two levels.

For the longest time, I assumed there would be an elevator or some way you could access the second level in a wheelchair. But after actively looking, I couldn’t find one. Technically, there are pedways leading into the mall from other buildings and those buildings have elevators. But I feel like “to get to the second level, exit the building and enter through another building after using their elevator” is not a reasonable accessibility plan.

Still though, the stores themselves on the second level are accessible. So do we label them accessible because the features are accessible, or do we label them unaccessible because there is no reasonable way for a wheelchair user to get to them?

My take has been that they are not accessible, even if the stores themselves are. If someone in a wheelchair entered the mall and saw a map that showed the stores as accessible, then they would assume that they could actually access them. If they learned that they are accessible after they leave the building and get back inside through a maze, I would say it is reasonable for them to feel like they got lied to. It is not useful information to say “after you manage to find a way in there, you’ll have an easy time of shopping inside.”