Frequently Asked Questions

Accessible Places has two views. Quickstart Modeis a reduced interface for a fast start: three big paths (“Search nearby”, “Search a venue”, “Search another city”), eight fixed categories, and no filter settings. On smartphones it's the default view on a fresh install. Turbo Mode is the full app with every filter, every source, and all 51 categories — the default on desktop.

Both modes draw on the same accessibility data — Quickstart Mode just shows a narrower, pre-filtered selection. You can switch between them at any time by tapping the mode-switch icon at the top of the header; your choice is remembered.

Note: unless stated otherwise, the rest of this FAQ describes Turbo Mode. In Quickstart Mode, the same searches run through the three tiles on the start screen instead of the search field and category chips.

With the “All” chip, Accessible Places searches the following 51 place categories at once, grouped into the same 8 groups you see when you open a category chip:

Food & drink: Bar, Beer Garden, Café & Ice Cream, Fast Food, Pub, Restaurant · Accommodation: Campsite, Apartment, Hostel, Hotel · Culture: Library, Gallery, Cinema, Museum, Attraction, Theater, Zoo/Aquarium · Sport & leisure: Fitness Center, Park, Swimming Pool, Playground, Sports Centre · Health: Pharmacy, Doctor's Office, Hearing Aids, Hospital, Optician, Physiotherapy, Rehabilitation Center, Medical Supply Store, Veterinarian, Dentist · Shopping: Bakery, Clothing Store, Florist, Bookshop, Drugstore, Bicycle Shop, Convenience Store, Butcher, Furniture Store, Shoe Shop, Supermarket · Everyday Services: Bank, Hairdresser, Post Office, Laundromat · Public & transit: Train Station, Place of Worship, Town Hall, Petrol Station

The visible category chips are just a selection of the most popular categories — “All” goes beyond them. Not included are the quick-search chips 🅿 Parking and 🚻 Toilets: they start a separate search for parking spots or toilets and are not place categories.

Tap the location button (⌖) on the map and then "Search here", or type your location. Below the search field you'll find the quick-search chips 🅿 Parking and 🚻 Toilets. Tapping a chip replaces the regular search results and shows only wheelchair-accessible parking or accessible toilets within your set radius (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.

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. Since Wheelmap edits flow directly into OpenStreetMap, this valuable data is also available in 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.

Despite careful work, some areas are not yet fully accessible:

• Map view: Individual markers on the map cannot be reached by keyboard (a limitation of the map library). As an equivalent alternative, the results list contains every result and is fully operable by keyboard and screen reader.
• Contrast on the map: Coloured markers and text over photos sit on varying backgrounds, where contrast may in some cases fall below the target values.
• Text size in the iOS app:The native iOS app does not automatically follow the “Larger Text” setting; pinch-to-zoom is available instead.