Accessibility

What we hold about places

The Atlas records access details for 82 of 10,717 places. All of them are shops, and the detail is a single line: step-free, partly accessible, or steps at the entrance.

That is the whole of it. Not a ratio we are pleased with, and not one worth dressing up. Where the line exists it appears on the place page, beside the other things you would want before setting out rather than after.

What we will not do

We do not infer access from a category. A gallery is not accessible because galleries usually are; a bush track is not inaccessible because tracks usually are. Every generated sentence of that kind we have found has been wrong about some real place, and the people it was wrong about were the ones who had planned around it.

For the same reason, an empty field stays empty. A place with no line here is one nobody has checked — it is not a place we are telling you to avoid.

Why there is no accessibility filter

A filter would work. It would also return a nearly empty map, and a reader would reasonably conclude that almost nowhere in Australia is accessible, which is not what the data says — it is what the gaps in the data say. A control that turns our ignorance into an answer is worse than no control.

When there is enough here to filter on, we will add it, and this paragraph will change.

Correcting or adding a place

If you run a place on the Atlas, claim it and the access line is yours to set and change, free, at any tier. Claim your listing.

If you have been somewhere and what we say is wrong — or we say nothing and you know the answer — that is worth more to the next reader than anything we can gather at a desk. Write to listings@australianatlas.com.au and name the place. We would rather take a wrong line down today than wait to replace it.

This website

The site has not been through a formal WCAG audit, so we are not going to claim a conformance level. What we can say is what is built in: every page opens with a skip link to the main content, the document declares its language, keyboard focus is given a visible state rather than being suppressed, and the stylesheet answers the reduced-motion setting in 39 separate places.

The known weak spot is the map. It needs a pointer and a browser that can run it, and the list and region pages are the way around it rather than an equivalent of it.

If something here does not work with the way you use a computer, tell us at hello@australianatlas.com.au. A description of what happened is enough — you should not have to diagnose our site to report it.