How we built a crowd-sourced accessibility review platform for people with disabilities
Access A11Y — the "Yelp for accessibility" — gives the disability community a trusted, community-driven resource for finding accessible businesses across DC and NYC.
The situation before and after
- No centralized resource for accessibility information existed
- People with disabilities had to call ahead or show up and hope
- Yelp's accessibility filters were too shallow and unreliable
- Crowd-sourced, disability-specific reviews did not exist anywhere
- The Equal Rights Center had no digital tool to serve the community directly
- Every outing required uncertainty that non-disabled people never face
- Fully functional crowd-sourced review platform live and in use
- Search by location and facility type across DC and NYC
- Community members can add listings and write accessibility reviews
- Granular accessibility data — far beyond what general platforms offer
- The Equal Rights Center has a mission-driven digital product at scale
- People with disabilities can plan outings with confidence
The challenge
For most people, choosing a restaurant or running an errand is simple. For people with disabilities, it is not. A step at the entrance. A restroom that is technically accessible but barely usable. A parking lot with no accessible spaces left. These are not inconveniences — they are barriers that determine whether someone can participate in public life.
The problem was not just the barriers themselves. It was the uncertainty. There was no reliable way to know ahead of time whether a place was actually accessible. Calling ahead meant hoping someone answered and actually knew the answer. Showing up and discovering the place was inaccessible meant a wasted trip, potential embarrassment, and real frustration.
Yelp had an "accessible" checkbox. But a checkbox does not tell you whether there is a step at the entrance, whether the accessible restroom is on a different floor, or whether the ramp is steep enough to be a hazard. Community members knew what mattered. They just had no shared place to record and share that knowledge.
The Equal Rights Center — a civil rights organization working to eliminate discriminatory barriers in Washington DC and New York — saw an opportunity. If the disability community could pool what they know about real-world accessibility, that knowledge would become a powerful resource. They needed a platform to make it possible. They came to NetAesthetics to build it.
What we built
Why not just add accessibility filters to an existing platform like Yelp?
The Equal Rights Center considered this. The answer was that existing platforms treat accessibility as an afterthought — a single binary field that cannot capture the nuance the disability community actually needs. Is there a ramp? How steep? Is the accessible entrance in the front or around the back? Is the accessible restroom on the ground floor or only via elevator? Does the venue have sensory-friendly lighting or quiet hours?
General platforms are not built for these questions. They are not moderated by people who understand accessibility, and there is no community of disabled users actively contributing and fact-checking the data. Building within an existing platform would mean inheriting all of those limitations. A purpose-built platform was the only path to something genuinely useful.
How does the listing and review system work?
NetAesthetics built the full platform from the ground up on WordPress, using a custom architecture that supports two core actions: searching and contributing. Users can search by location and facility type — restaurant, medical office, retail, transit, government building — and browse results with accessibility detail. Each listing shows what the community has reported: entrance accessibility, parking, restroom access, elevator presence, and more.
Any registered user can add a listing that does not yet exist in the database, and any user can leave a structured accessibility review. The review format guides contributors through the specific information that matters — not just "was it accessible?" but exactly what features were present or absent. This structured input makes the data useful rather than vague.
The platform was built to support DC and NYC coverage from launch, with an architecture designed to expand to additional cities without requiring a rebuild.
What technical challenges came with crowd-sourced data?
Crowd-sourced data introduces problems that curated data does not. Duplicate listings, inaccurate submissions, stale information — all of these needed to be addressed in the system design, not left as moderation problems to solve later.
NetAesthetics built duplicate detection logic into the listing submission flow, so users attempting to add a location that already exists are redirected to the existing listing. The review system includes structured fields rather than open text, which reduces noise and makes it easier to surface actionable data. Google Analytics was integrated from day one to give the Equal Rights Center visibility into how the community was using the platform — which searches were most common, which cities were most active, and where data gaps existed.
The stack — JavaScript, PHP, Bootstrap, jQuery, WordPress, and Amazon Web Services — was chosen for reliability and long-term maintainability. Modernizr was included to handle progressive enhancement across older assistive technology browsers, which the disability community disproportionately relies on.
How does the Equal Rights Center use the platform day to day?
The Equal Rights Center uses Access A11Y as both a community service and an advocacy tool. The data community members contribute gives the ERC a real-time picture of where accessibility gaps are concentrated — which neighborhoods, which business categories, which types of barriers appear most frequently. That data supports the ERC's legal and policy work.
The platform also functions as a demonstration of what the disability community knows and how organized that knowledge can be when given the right infrastructure. It shifts the conversation from "we need to investigate whether this place is accessible" to "the community already knows — here is the record."
Results
Project details
Washington DC & New York
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