Making accessibility visible, together

Welcome! We are Sozialhelden e.V., a registered nonprofit association that has campaigned for the rights of people with disabilities and for an inclusive society for more than 17 years. True to our motto “Einfach mal machen!” — roughly, “just get on with it” — we build practical solutions that make barriers visible and take them down.

The built environment in our cities and rural areas is often full of obstacles for millions of people with disabilities, and that severely restricts their everyday mobility. One big problem stands in the way of smart decisions about improvements: a comprehensive overview and comparable data on actual accessibility are usually missing.

That is where our current project comes in: the a11y-Score.

What the a11y-Score sets out to achieve

The a11y-Score is more than a collection of data. Our goal is to build a worldwide data layer for accessibility — and with it, for the first time, an indicator that makes regions comparable both locally and internationally.

This project is funded by the German Federal Ministry of Transport (BMV) under the mFUND innovation program. That underlines the nationwide relevance and the strategic value of our approach: advancing the digital transformation of mobility and improving participation.

In concrete terms, this means:

• Visibility and comparability: the a11y-Score gives you a single consistent figure for accessibility in any district, county, or whole region.
• A basis for decisions: it works as a key performance indicator (KPI) for cities and municipalities — to assess the status quo, measure progress over time, and derive targeted recommendations for action (on construction work, data collection, or campaigns, for example).
• Real inclusion: by making this data available, we help improve participation for people with disabilities and build a human-made environment that works for everyone.

Your contribution: what your municipality gains

As holders of public sector information (PSI), you have valuable data — the backbone of a meaningful a11y-Score. Your involvement decides how successful and how relevant this project can be.

Sharing your data creates value on several levels:

A better quality of life for your residents: you let people with mobility, vision, or hearing disabilities organize their daily lives on their own terms. Precise information about accessible routes, buildings, and services is a key foundation of real participation.

Data-driven planning and management: the a11y-Score gives you objective metrics to plan infrastructure projects, funding measures, and policy decisions on solid ground, and to track their effect over time. Meeting legal requirements and ethical responsibilities: the project actively supports you in implementing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UN CRPD), the EU Strategy for the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, and the European Accessibility Act. Accessibility becomes a measurable mark of quality for your administration.

Advancing open data and standardization: by making your data available, you strengthen the open data movement and support the development of international standards for accessibility data.

Part of an established network: Sozialhelden e.V. brings more than a decade of expertise in accessibility data — through Wheelmap.org, with over 3.2 million places, and our backend infrastructure Accessibility.Cloud, with more than 150 data partners, among others. We know how to harmonize diverse data sources and make them usable.

Contributing is simple: share your data

The most effective way to contribute your data — and to keep it widely available and durable — is to enter it directly into OpenStreetMap (OSM). OSM is an open, collaborative geodata database used all over the world. Data in OSM is easy to get at and can be used by countless other applications for years to come. It is the same thinking that underpins Wheelmap.org.

Public authorities in many countries already use OpenStreetMap as a kind of “open land registry” — for example:

• in the public transit routing of NVBW, the regional transit authority of Baden-Württemberg, Germany.
• in the passenger information system of Swiss Federal Railways (SBB).
• in the German state of Hesse — as a data pipeline that makes roadworks on country roads usable in TomTom and HERE car navigation systems.
• in car navigation everywhere: carmakers have been wiring OpenStreetMap in as a data source for years now — Mercedes, Toyota, and Tesla among them. Entries therefore reach car navigation systems "automatically", with no separate arrangement with the manufacturers needed.

If you hold data relevant to the a11y-Score covering all of Germany, and entering it into OSM directly is not practical for you right now, we are glad to help integrate it into our a11y-Score data layer instead. We will walk you through the process and handle the harmonization it needs. In our experience that takes a little patience and happens in many small steps — but it saves effort and cost for good.

Let us shape this change together!

Do get in touch for more information, or to talk about working together!

Jonas Deister, Director of Partnerships

Relevant OSM tags for the a11y-Score

Calculating a meaningful a11y-Score depends on detailed information about accessibility in public space. Here is an overview of the main OSM tags (key-value pairs) that feed into our algorithm:

Note: the tags listed here are a selection of the most important attributes. Our algorithm keeps evolving and can take further relevant information on board as needed.