About three years ago, I had given a talk to some folks at the Irish Wheelchair Association in Kilkenny about the history of Kilkenny. They wanted me to do that again, but I thought that giving the same talk would be boring and asked whether I could talk about mapping accessibility instead. They were open to the idea, so I did that. I thought it would be a good opportunity to tell them about OpenStreetMap, but also to get some input from them about what else we could map.

In preparation for the talk, I created an “accessibility” preset in StreetComplete with quests all to do with wheelchair and visually impaired mapping, including the surface quest, because I figured that would be important for the routing services for wheelchairs. I surveyed quite a bit in Kilkenny city centre to get an idea of what the situation in town is.

I’ve recorded a video with the same slides I used for the talk which you can watch on YouTube (proof-read English and German subtitles available).

Additional quests for StreetComplete that I came up either by myself or with their help are (They’re also in the video, but it’s handy to have them listed here.):

• Is this ATM wheelchair accessible?
• Is this vending machine accessible?
• Is payment in this shop/ restaurant wheelchair accessible? (They said that sometimes the payment terminals are fixed in place too high up on a counter.)

After the talk, one of the facilitators told me about an upcoming audit walk in Kilkenny (on the 24th of July) to assess accessibility. So I got in contact with them to tell them about wheelmap.org and sent them a link to the video, so they don’t audit things I have already surveyed.

I used two overpass-turbo queries in the talk/ video to show some of the data that can be extracted from OSM:

• shops with the wheelchair key, colour-coded by accessibility (which is similar to wheelmap, but the data can be exported)
• steps and ramps, colour-coded by the ramp key (yes/ no/ separate/ no data)

Additional ones could be:

• steps and tactile paving
• highway=crossing and tactile paving - I might actually use that for quality control, bc the data for Kilkenny could be outdated.

I’ll add more information here after the audit, if I take part and remember to do so.