u/AdventurousAd452

Hey all,

I'm a high school student and I built PathAble, a web app for crowdsourcing ADA accessibility features (ramps, curb cuts, elevators, handrails, staircases) and routing around them. Stack-wise it's Leaflet for the map, OSM tiles via CartoDB, OSRM for routing, and Geoapify for geocoding, with a Flask backend and Supabase/PostGIS for storage.

Right now markers are user-submitted rather than pulled from OSM tags directly, users drop a pin, snap a photo, and a vision model auto-tags what's in the image (ramp, staircase, etc). I know OSM already has accessibility tagging conventions (wheelchair=yes/no/limited, tactile_paving, etc) and projects like WheelMap and AccessMap exist in this space already, including one specifically for Seattle.

I'd love feedback from people who actually know this space well:

- Does it make more sense long-term to write accessibility data back into OSM directly instead of a separate database, so it benefits the wider ecosystem instead of being siloed in my app?

- Any obvious gaps in how I'm tagging/categorizing features compared to established OSM accessibility conventions?

- Anyone doing something similar who'd be open to comparing notes?

Live app here if you want to poke at it: https://pathable-mu.vercel.app

Open to any and all criticism, this is very much a work in progress and I'd rather build it right than build it fast.

Hey r/mobilityaids ,

I'm a high school student and I've spent the last several months building PathAble, a free web app that maps ADA accessibility features like ramps, curb cuts, elevators, and handrails, and gives walking directions that show accessibility info along the route.

The idea is pretty simple: you can drop a pin anywhere, snap a photo of an accessibility feature, and it gets tagged and added to the map for everyone else to see. Over time this could build into a real crowdsourced picture of where the world is and isn't accessible, especially in places official maps don't really cover well.

Right now it's got a small group of testers but I want to open it up more and get real feedback, especially from anyone who actually deals with mobility access issues day to day, since that feedback matters way more than mine.

Link: https://pathable-mu.vercel.app

It's completely free, no login required, no ads, nothing collected beyond anonymous usage stats so I can tell if it's working. If you try it out, I'd genuinely appreciate any bugs, missing features, or brutal honesty in the comments. Also happy to answer questions about how it works if anyone's curious.

Thanks for reading this far.