Crowdsourcing

The practice of gathering information, data, or contributions from a large group of distributed participants, typically via the internet. In accessibility, crowdsourcing platforms like Wheelmap and AccessTogether allow users to rate and report the accessibility of physical locations — such as whether a restaurant has wheelchair access or a station has accessible toilets. While crowdsourcing can rapidly scale data collection, research shows that accessibility data gathered this way often suffers from very high rates of missing information, with government-published datasets typically providing more complete and reliable coverage.