Doorway: Accessibility Notes

Before an ordinary Friday night out, some people spend twenty minutes on reconnaissance. Squinting at street photos for a step. Phoning ahead to be told "oh yes, we're accessible" by a venue whose only toilet is up six stairs. Doorway is where you keep the answers instead, for every place you have actually been. NINETY SECONDS, AT THE TABLE A survey is a short run of concrete questions, and you can skip any of them. The way in: steps and the height of the tallest one, ramp or platform lift, how wide the opening is, how heavy the door is, what is underfoot in the doorway. The toilet: step free or not, a cubicle built for wheelchair use, grab bars on one side or both, room to turn. Inside: room between the tables, one level or not, chairs that move, somewhere to sit while you wait. Sound and light: how loud, music, lighting, how busy, a quieter corner, the size of the print, a hearing loop. Then staff, in one question with four honest answers. Nothing here is a star rating. Every answer is a fact a stranger can act on. READ IT THROUGH YOUR OWN NEEDS Build a lens from five modules: wheeled mobility, walking with limits, sound and crowding, low vision, hearing. Set your thresholds once, the step you can get over and the narrowest door you fit through, and every place is judged against those numbers. The verdict shows its working: "one step, 14 cm, no ramp", "a portable ramp, so somebody has to be there to put it out", "quiet enough to follow a conversation". Turn the lens off for everyone view when you are looking on somebody else's behalf. EVIDENCE, WITH A DATE ON IT Every answer carries who recorded it and when. Surveys that agree are counted, surveys that disagree are kept and shown rather than hidden, and anything nobody has seen for a year is flagged and its verdict downgraded. Confirming a place is still accurate takes one tap, which is the smallest useful contribution there is, and it counts once a day however many times you press it. Where there is no photograph, Doorway draws the entrance to scale on a measured grid from the recorded numbers: the steps, the rise, the width of the opening, the ramp at the gradient a permanent one is built to. It says plainly that it is a drawing and not a photograph. READ AT A GLANCE, OR IN FULL A verdict is drawn as the thing it is about. A door standing open with light coming through means the place works for your lens, a door part open means check something first, a shut door with a step at its foot means it does not, and an outline means nobody has recorded enough to say. The word is always beside the drawing, because an app about access that leans on colour alone is arguing against itself. Text can be set larger in three steps and the drawn labels grow with it. POOLING, BY HAND There is no server and no account, so a group pools what it knows as a file. Export a pack, send it however you like, and when a friend opens it their surveys and yours compose place by place. Your needs profile is never in the file. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO There is no map, because map tiles need a network and this app has none. There is no crowd, because nothing you record is uploaded. Noise is your judgement, kept with the time of day, not a microphone reading, and the microphone is never opened. Faces are not detected for you, because that needs a model the app does not carry; you get a blur brush instead, and the pixels you paint over are destroyed before the photograph is stored. WHY THE PERMISSIONS Camera, to photograph a doorway while you are standing in it. Location, to sort your places by how far away they are and to pin one where you are standing. Vibration, for a short tap when an answer lands. There is no internet permission at all, which is why nothing here can leave your phone by itself. Free and complete. No account, no subscription, no ads, nothing held back. A sample high street of eight invented places is offered on first run, labelled as a sample throughout, and removable in one tap.