Maayan Ziv Mapped the Detail Travel Brochures Leave Out
AccessNow treats accessibility as specific, searchable information rather than a single reassuring label—and that changes how a journey can be planned.
In short
Who. Toronto photographer and entrepreneur Maayan Ziv founded AccessNow after repeatedly encountering a travel problem that brochures rarely solved: places could call themselves accessible without providing the details she needed as a wheelchair user.
The decision. She turned that information gap into a map. AccessNow gathers accessibility information about venues and routes so travellers can search for particular features and learn from reports made by people who have been there.
Why it matters. Accessibility is not one binary property. An entrance without steps may still have a narrow doorway, an unsuitable washroom, a broken lift or a route whose steep surface changes the journey.
Limits. Crowdsourced information can age, describe one person’s experience or miss temporary barriers. A map helps users ask better questions; it cannot guarantee that every listed feature will work on arrival.
What travellers can use. Replace “Is it accessible?” with a short list of measurable needs, confirm the trip’s critical links and keep contact details for the venue and transport operator.
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What happened
AccessNow describes its mission as making accessibility information discoverable through technology, education and community action. Its public map lets users explore places and add information. The organization identifies Ziv as founder and chief executive and says her work grew from lived experience with muscular dystrophy.
A University of Toronto case study published in 2020 places the project’s origin in a familiar frustration: information about whether a venue would work was difficult to find and often unreliable. The app’s premise was to make users’ observations searchable rather than leave them scattered across private conversations.
The scale of the underlying issue is large. The World Health Organization estimates that about 1.3 billion people—roughly 16% of the global population—experience significant disability. That group is not homogeneous, and neither are access requirements.
Statistics Canada’s 2024 travel survey gives the information gap a practical shape. Among people with disabilities or long-term conditions who travelled, barriers appeared in vehicles, terminals, booking systems, physical environments, technology and communication. The survey does not describe every country, but it shows why a destination-level promise cannot cover a chain of many services.
What the evidence supports
Statistics Canada reported that 34% of travellers with disabilities or long-term conditions experienced a barrier inside an airplane, train, intercity bus or ferry. Among travellers who had greater difficulty with daily activities, 53% encountered a barrier at a terminal. For those reporting on-site barriers, the physical environment was the most common category, followed by technology and communication.
Those results come from a national survey, not AccessNow’s own marketing. They support the broader claim that travel accessibility is a sequence problem. A journey may fail at ticketing, boarding, transfer, entrance, navigation or the washroom even when most individual links work.
AccessNow supplies a response: feature-level and experience-based information. Its own materials are primary evidence about what the platform intends to do, but they cannot independently establish accuracy or coverage everywhere. User reports require dates, definitions and correction mechanisms.
Ziv’s 2024 essay for AFAR makes another evidence distinction. Personal experience can reveal categories that standardized listings omit, but one review cannot speak for every disabled traveller. The value of a community map lies in collecting varied observations while letting the next user decide which details apply.
How the story is being framed
For a wheelchair user, “step-free” may be essential but incomplete. Surface, gradient, doorway width, turning space and accessible toilets can matter. For a blind traveller, navigation cues, staff assistance and the accessibility of a booking interface may be more decisive. For a Deaf traveller, captioning, visual alerts and communication options may shape the same venue differently.
That diversity explains why a universal badge is tempting and dangerous. A badge is quick to display and easy to filter. It can also imply a settled answer where only a bundle of features exists.
Tourism businesses face a real burden in documenting those features, especially across old buildings and changing routes. Yet precise disclosure does not require claiming perfection. “Three steps at the entrance; portable ramp available; call ahead” is more useful than a green icon whose criteria are invisible.
Crowdsourcing introduces another tension. First-hand reports can be current, concrete and independent of a venue’s promotion. They can also become stale or inconsistent. The best system therefore treats reviews as evidence with context—a date, feature and perspective—not as permanent certification.
Ziv’s contribution is to make that specificity part of travel discovery. The map does not abolish barriers. It makes some of them visible early enough for a traveller to choose, verify or challenge.
The background
Travel is often sold as spontaneity, but many journeys already depend on advance information: passports, timetables, weather, luggage limits and reservations. Accessible travel adds questions that mainstream booking systems have historically treated as special requests rather than ordinary product data.
This separation creates what might be called an information tax. The traveller must phone several operators, explain requirements repeatedly and judge whether confident answers describe actual conditions. Missing information can narrow choice even before a physical barrier does.
Digital maps can reduce that tax when they store structured details and let communities correct them. They can also reproduce inequity if wealthy city centres are richly reviewed while rural routes, lower-income destinations and non-English listings remain sparse. Coverage is itself an access issue.
The useful standard is not whether technology labels the whole world accessible. It is whether a person can distinguish known facts from unknowns. A dated photograph of an entrance, a measured doorway and a note that a lift was out of service last week each carry different certainty. Good platforms preserve those differences.
Practical impact
Build a journey as linked stages: booking, arrival, transport, entrance, room or attraction, food, washroom and return. Mark the two or three links whose failure would end the trip. For those, seek measurable details and confirm them close to departure. Save screenshots and phone numbers because connectivity can fail. If a platform entry is old or vague, treat it as a lead rather than a guarantee.
Who it touches
Ziv’s work is notable because it starts from a person refusing the role travel systems assigned her. The missing data were not a private inconvenience to solve repeatedly; they were information that could be gathered, organized and shared.
That choice also resists a familiar heroic narrative. AccessNow is not a story about one founder overcoming disability so everyone else can be inspired. It is a design story about moving effort. Instead of requiring each traveller to rediscover the same barrier alone, a community can record it once and make the next decision more informed.
The human achievement is therefore collective. A founder built the container, but its usefulness depends on contributors describing places honestly, venues correcting details and travellers retaining authority over what works for them.
The deeper story
Information is part of infrastructure. A ramp that exists but cannot be confirmed may be almost as unusable to a distant traveller as no ramp at all. Conversely, accurate notice of a barrier can preserve agency by allowing a different route, date or destination.
Accessibility data also improves ordinary description. It replaces praise words with observable features. That discipline benefits parents with prams, older travellers, people recovering from injury and anyone carrying luggage—without erasing the specific rights and needs of disabled people.
Reader outcome
What changed. AccessNow turned scattered first-hand accessibility knowledge into a searchable travel-planning resource.
Why it matters. Precise information can shift effort from emergency problem-solving during a trip to informed choice before it.
What to watch. Look for dated entries, clear feature definitions, correction paths, geographic coverage and direct confirmation of essential services.
What would change our minds. Evidence that listings routinely remain stale or collapse different needs into one score would weaken their value. Transparent verification and timely community updates would strengthen it.
Something to sit with
Think of the last destination description you trusted. Did it offer measurable facts or only adjectives? A useful travel page should make the physical route imaginable before arrival—and should say plainly what it does not yet know.
Sources
- AccessNow — About — https://accessnow.com/about/
- University of Toronto Rotman — AccessNow Case Study — https://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/faculty-and-research/research-centre...
- Statistics Canada — Accessibility Barriers to Travel — https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/250527/dq250527b-eng.htm
- World Health Organization — Disability Fact Sheet — https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/disability-and-health
- AFAR — How to Redefine Accessible Travel — https://www.afar.com/magazine/how-to-redefine-accessible-travel
We report facts from the sources above in our own words and link to the originals. Interpretation is ours, not theirs.
Why is a single 'accessible' label often insufficient for travel planning?
Useful planning depends on specific features and individual requirements; broad labels can hide crucial differences and are not standardized across every context.
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