Back

Frequently Asked Questions

13 questions in 4 categories

Basics

Accessible Places helps people with wheelchairs or limited mobility find accessible venues in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. A key focus is data reliability: accessibility information in Google Maps is often incomplete and difficult to filter in a meaningful way. Accessible Places solves exactly this problem — offering a fast, easy-to-use search that aggregates and rates information from multiple sources.
Restaurants, cafés, bars, pubs, beer gardens, fast food / snack bars, hotels, hostels, holiday apartments, museums, theatres, cinemas, libraries, galleries, attractions and ice cream shops.
Yes, completely free and no registration required.

Search & Discover

Simply enter a location — for example "Berlin Mitte" or "Vienna" — and choose a category such as restaurant or hotel. Accessible Places searches multiple data sources instantly and shows you accessible venues nearby. The app covers the entire DACH region: Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Tap "Nearby" and allow location access. Accessible Places automatically detects your position and searches for accessible restaurants, cafés or other venues in your immediate vicinity — no need to type a location.

Switch to “Nearby” mode (left tab). Once your location is detected, two buttons appear: “Search only: 🅿 Parking” and “Search only: 🚻 Toilets”. Tapping one hides all other search results and shows only wheelchair-accessible parking or accessible toilets within your set radius (default: 4 km, adjustable in Settings).

Toilet markers appear in green for standalone public toilets (e.g. in squares or parks) and in violet for toilets inside venues. Tap a marker for details such as Euro key requirement or changing table.

Alternatively, use the layer buttons at the bottom-left of the map (🅿 and 🚻) to show parking or toilet markers alongside your regular search results.

Data & Reliability

The app combines data from several specialised sources: OpenStreetMap (OSM), accessibility.cloud (including Wheelmap.org), Ginto (for Switzerland) and Google Places. Each source is weighted by its trustworthiness — from manually verified entries to automatically collected data. The coloured circle next to each entry shows at a glance how solid the data is.
Green means reliable accessibility information, yellow means moderate data quality, and red means uncertain or incomplete data. The colour reflects how trustworthy the available information is — not whether a place is accessible or not.
Data is fetched live from the sources on every search. Manually verified entries from Wheelmap contributors are highlighted with a special badge.
Google Maps contains little structured accessibility information and offers no dedicated filter for it. Accessible Places is built specifically for this search: it combines multiple specialised data sources, rates each piece of information by reliability, and shows at a glance how suitable a venue is for wheelchair users.

Wheelmap.org and Accessible Places pursue similar goals but set different priorities — they are not competitors but complement each other. Wheelmap is one of the largest crowdsourcing platforms for accessibility: thousands of people add places there directly. This valuable data also feeds into Accessible Places.

Accessible Places focuses on four things:

  • Multiple sources, transparently rated: Accessible Places merges data from different sources into a single, unified view — from professionally certified on-site surveys, through community-maintained maps like Wheelmap and OpenStreetMap, to automatically aggregated listings such as Google Places. Each source has its strengths: a certified survey documents a venue in fine detail; the Wheelmap and OpenStreetMap community covers an enormous breadth of places and contributes information checked on the ground; while automatically collected data is available almost everywhere but is often less precise. As a result, how complete and verified the information is varies from entry to entry. Rather than blurring those differences, Accessible Places makes them visible: a coloured circle shows at a glance how solid each entry's information is, and the detail view reveals which sources it came from.
  • Best data per region: For each region we integrate the strongest local source. In Switzerland, for example, Ginto provides particularly high-quality accessibility data. This creates the best possible data basis everywhere.
  • List view instead of map: Wheelmap.org shows places primarily on a map — you navigate to see what's nearby. Accessible Places delivers results as a sorted list first: with reliability rating, entrance and toilet information at a glance. The map is always available as an alternative, but isn't the primary view.
  • Wheelchair parking:Accessible Places shows wheelchair-accessible parking directly on the map. The question “Where is the nearest accessible parking space?” can be answered with a single click — something other platforms don't offer in this way.

If you'd like to contribute accessibility data yourself, Wheelmap.org is the best place to do so — new entries appear here too after a short while.

App & Contributing

Yes — Accessible Places can be installed as an app on your phone without the App Store or Play Store. On iPhone/iPad: open Safari → tap the Share icon → select "Add to Home Screen". On Android: open Chrome → tap the menu (three dots) → "Install app" or "Add to home screen". Once installed it behaves like a native app — with its own icon, full screen and no browser bar.
Use the "Feedback" link at the bottom of the page to open a short form. No account or registration required.