General

Wheel-users’ heaven!

Achensee
~ Alison ~ Leave a comment

We’ve just come back from a holiday in Austria and I have discovered that Lake Achensee is wheel-users’ heaven! There is a mainly smooth pathway around most of the lake which was being used by cyclists, rollerbladers, people using segways, people with buggies and wheelchairs and me with my scooter! We didn’t see other scooter-users while we were away, which perhaps explains the interested (even admiring!) looks my scooter got. A business opportunity there for someone! The views around the lake are spectacularly beautiful and there are plenty of cafés with accessible terraces – more information on the area to follow!

Achensee
Achensee

Hotel booking sites

~ Alison ~ Leave a comment

Why is it that some hotel booking sites let you filter the choices for accessibility and others don’t? Trivago let you filter for details such as whether you want a hairdryer or ironing board but not if the place needs to be wheelchair accessible – mad!

Hotels.com do much better: there is a filter category for accessibility features including accessible parking and Braille signage. Shame they use the phrase ‘handicapped parking’ but well done them for having the filter.

Sawday’s lets you filter for wheelchair accessibility and/or limited mobility, which seems sensible.

Laterooms don’t have any kind of accessibility features in their filter nor do Expedia, while Booking.com have one filter for ‘facilities for disabled guests’ which is better than nothing.

Why on earth don’t they all have the filters? What do other people think?

Wheelmap.org

~ Alison ~ Leave a comment

While researching this summer’s holiday, I found a website that marks on a map accessible places such as restaurants, transport links, toilets, shops etc – you can choose the categories you want the map to show. You can zoom in and out and click on the places marked – they are red, orange or green depending on their accessibility although most places are grey because the site doesn’t have information on them; presumably this will improve with time. Clicking on the places marked sometimes leads to more information, sometimes not but you could always google the places once you have found them. I also looked at York that I am familiar with and it seemed to be accurate. It would also be useful for people with kids’ buggies. Worth checking out, then and hopefully the site will only get better.

http://wheelmap.org/en/

Here we go

~ Alison ~ Leave a comment

Hi, I’m going to start publishing reviews of places I’ve visited: general views but also mentioning how accessible they are, something often missed out in reviews you read in the media. I hope they are useful!