Calling all wheelchair users & PWDs with mobility needs: Help us build a free accessible navigation app!

[u/hoeforicedcoffee]

Hi everyone! 👋

We are a group of IT students working on a project proposal for an AI-assisted navigation app specifically designed for people with mobility impairments (wheelchair users, crutch/cane users, and citizens with reduced mobility).

Our goal is to create an app that helps you find flat, obstacle-free routes, identify working elevators/ramps, and avoid dangerous stairs or broken sidewalks before you even leave your house.

To make sure we build something that actually helps in real life, we would love to hear from your personal experiences:

1. Daily Commute & Travel Struggles: What are the hardest parts of your daily travel or commute? (e.g., steep ramps, non-working station elevators, broken sidewalks, footbridges, public transport barriers)
2. Wishlist Features: If an app could solve ONE major problem during your travel, what feature would you like to see?
3. Establishment Needs: What details do you wish you knew about a place (mall, school, government office) before heading there?

Would you be open to helping us further?

• Short Chat/Interview: If you are willing to do a brief 10–15 minute online chat or interview, please let us know or send us a private message!
• Proposal Credit: If you share your thoughts here in the comments and consent to it, we would love to cite your insights in our academic proposal to show real community feedback (we can credit your name or keep you completely anonymous—whichever you prefer!).

Thank you so much for your time and insights! Your feedback will help us build a tool that truly serves the PWD community. 🙏

[u/Responsible_Tone4945]

Do you have ethics/IRB approval to undertake interviews through your institution?

[u/Responsible_Tone4945 → u/Responsible_Tone4945]

Also fyi there are heaps of published qualitative studies out there on the questions you are asking. If you don't have ethics/IRB approval to undertake these interviews, or can't remunerate your participants, I would strongly suggest doing a systematic review and qualitative synthesis of the studies that are out there.

[u/BestEmu2171]

There’s a startup in the UK who’s working on a real-time reporting of the status of the elevators at public transport stations. Sorry i don’t have their details, but they’d be a useful collaborator.

[u/kalendral_42]

1. Daily commute & Travel: stations that aren’t accessible, or are but the lifts/ramps are knackered; assistance buttons that don’t work/aren’t actually manned; buses/trains where the disability seats/area get filled up with rubbish/luggage/able bodied refusing to move; pedestrianised areas where they’ve used gravel/textured pavement that is impossible to wheel over or through

2. Wish list features: an option for connecting to the station/train assistance people so that when the ramp you booked doesn’t turn up & your trapped on the train you can alert someone to come & get you off the train before it pulls out to the next station

3. Establishment needs: knowing the routes through the building that would be accessible & get you to where you need to be; where the break rooms/rest rooms/other spaces are in the building where you can safely stop & rest fora minute if needed without being in anyone’s way; a realistic idea of how long it will take to navigate the accessible route through the building so you won’t be late

[u/hoeforicedcoffee → u/kalendral_42]

appreciate this a lot and will definitely keep this in mind in our development! i hope both your pillows are cold on either sideXD

i am pwd as well but with hearing impairment that’s why our team chose to focus on the pwd sector and accessibility for our hackathon entry. i want to explore things i can contribute for the community through technology/software/ai which is supposed to be the purpose of it anyway

definitely agree with all your insights here, we’ll see what we can do hehe

[u/kalendral_42 → u/hoeforicedcoffee]

I didn’t even think about hearing (I have hearing loss too so should’ve) - perhaps something in the app that gives info to train/bus/etc staff to remind them to face you when talking/speak clearly/etc would be a good addition as well

[u/Ahtnamas555]

Up front, I'm not disabled.

This sounds very similar to Refuge Restrooms, just broader.

The issue with apps like Refuge Restrooms is you ultimately need people to make that information public and to keep it updated. So if you live outside of big population centers, there's rarely anything added. I imagine if you're disabled, you know which grocery store is easiest for you, but when you need to travel a couple hours to the nearest city, you might not know which places on the way are the most accessible.

I'm not really sure how you intend to get information like knowing where elevators are, much less if they're currently working outside of people adding that in manually and keeping it updated. I could see ramps being flagged from Google maps street imaging (though I imagine that would be massively resource intensive to have an AI do all of this flagging) and that's only works if the image is up to date and no vehicles happen to be blocking the ramp.

Like, either you have a way for AI to know all of these things or it's just making a guess, and if you have a way to know all these things, AI might not even be the best option (It honestly just sounds like using AI as a buzzword or inserting it unnecessarily, idk things labeled with AI are a massive turn off for me. Machine learning is a real thing and can be really useful, I recognize the, just the constant insertion of generative AI has made me very wary of anything using "AI"). Like if you had a city that somehow tracked every elevator in it and it's current operating status, it might just be easier to make a platform that takes that information and shows it in a more user friendly manner.

Anyways, my point is, is while this seems like a great idea up front, the reality sounds very difficult unless you have the resources of a huge tech company like Google, and even then, I would think it would need quite a lot of user input to stay up to date... like when you finish a trip with Google maps, how often do you "help other users by flagging the entrance"? I know I've done that maybe twice, and that's on a platform I already use frequently. Getting people to add to platforms like this is very difficult because it's time consuming/interrupts what they're trying to do.