Wheelchair accessible toilets

This page desrcibes various ways on how wheelchair accessible toilets can be mapped. It serves as a stepping stone, linking to various other pages and resources.

What is a wheelchair accessible toilet?

A wheelchair accessible toilet is a toilet that should be accessible to persons using a wheelchair or having other motoric problems. It typically has various extra aids, such as grab rails to transfer from the wheelchair to the toilt, a wide door, a faucet that is easier to use.

It is however important to know that "accessible" is different from person to person and has different legal definitions.

For example, a young, partially paralyzed person in a light wheelchair might be able to cross relatively high kerbs. Another person might be paralized on the right side and needs their support transfers to be on the left of the toilet. A person with severe motoric control might not need grab rail or transfer aids at all, but will need a special faucet they can operate.

In the same vein, various countries have various regulation on what they legally call a "wheelchair accessible toilet". Even then, it might or might not be accessible to some people depending on their situation. For this, various wheelchair-oriented apps try to capture ***physical properties*** of the toilet instead of simply saying "yes" or "no".

As such, wheelchair=yes can be seen as an indication but does not guarantee much for an actual wheelchair user.

How to tag?

Many relevant tagss (such as opening hours, access, fee, ...) are already described in amenity=toilets

wheelchair=yes/no/limited

Historically, the OpenStreetMap-wiki mentioned the following criteria for acceptable accessibility and thus gaining wheelchair=yes (with wheelchair=limited with matching some but not all properties:

Bulleted list item
Doorway's inner width min. 90 cm
Clear space min. 150 × 150 cm
Wheelchair-height toilet seat
Folding grab rails
Accessible hand basin

However, many contributors will not have checked this; but will simply have added wheelchair=yes if there is a toilet with a wheelchair icon. In theory, those toilets should meet the accessibility-criteria of their country, but there are many exceptions. At last, those requirements are different in every country.

What prefix to use?

There are various ways to tag toilets in OpenStreetMap:

- The toilet is added as standalone node or way using amenity=toilets - The toilet is added as part of another amenity, using toilets=yes. For example amenity=restaurant with toilets=yes indicates that there is a toilet at the restaurant which (at least) customers are allowed to use. In this case, all tags describing the toilet(s) should be prefixed with the prefixtoilets:*=*.

Furthermore, some tags will _always_ use a toilets-prefix, for example toilets:paper_supplied=*. For a full overview of those tags, please refer to amenity=toilets

The toilets-tag does not indicate how much toilets there are at a given location. There might be just one or multiple toilets. They can be split into different parts, each designated to certain groups of people. In Western countries, there are typically toilets for women, men and a designated toilet for wheelchair users (disregarding gender). If there is a toilet designated for wheelchair users, the prefix wheelchair:*=* is used to add properties about this wheelchair accessible toilet. If there is but a single toilet and this toilet might be wheelchair accessible (and typically also used by non-wheelchair-users), the properties do not need prefix.

It is still useful to map properties about wheelchair accessibility, even though the toilet is not explicitly marked as "wheelchair-accessible". For example, a toilet might be built in an attempt to be wheelchair-accessible, but might have failed to meet the legal requirements. As such, the toilet cannot be (legally) advertised as wheelchair-accessible; but might have some facilities making it available to some wheelchair users.