Proposal: isWheelchairAccessible

[nickevansuk]

Proposer

EMD UK (via https://github.com/openactive/ns-beta/issues/21), England Athletics

Use Case

• "As a potential participant, I want to know if this session is accessible to me"
• "As a carer, I want to know if this session is suitable for those in my care"

Why is this not covered by existing properties?

This property is specifically describing whether the Event is suitable for those in a wheelchair, which is more specific than the accessibilitySupport array. Also possible to represent true, false and null with a separate property.

Proposal

isWheelchairAccessible as a boolean

Example

"isWheelchairAccessible": true

Beta property

(Class) Property	Expected Type	Description
(schema:Event) beta:isWheelchairAccessible	schema:Boolean	A property that details whether the event is suitable for wheelchair access. Placed on Event as this field could be used to detail whether the Event is suitable, as well as the Place.

[nickevansuk]

(comments from @ldodds - copied from old beta process https://github.com/openactive/ns-beta/issues/21#issuecomment-382442283)

Having recently run a mapping exercise to explore wheelchair accessibility, I can say that indicating a true/false value is not necessarily enough here. It's also not clear what is being marked as accessible.

• A Place, e.g. a leisure centre might be wheelchair accessible. For example apps like Wheelmap indicate accessibility by reference to a standard set of criteria. This helps people judge for themselves whether a location is accessible.

• The event, e.g. can the organisers accommodate people who are in wheelchairs. This is covered by the accessibilitySupport property

• Whether an activity, in general, is suited to wheelchair users.

So I think its potentially misleading to indicate a true/false status on an Event, when there are several criteria. We should get some other opinions about how to handle this.

[IzyChampion]

Hi, related to this, I had a query from one of our partners, Disability Rights UK, about feeding in best practice around accessibility requirements (I'm not sure which bit of the spec that fits into; they mentioned that there is a Yes/No tick box for whether an activity is accessible?) - is this worth picking up through a sub-group? or some other way of focusing in on this?

[nickevansuk]

Hello! Disability Rights UK are correct, this level of granularity is not formalised in the specification, however the means to express accessibility support information is already included. I've inserted the quote of their comment here, and there are two further issues (this issue and here) which it would be really useful for them to comment on.