Designing step-free routes without making false accessibility promises

A route labelled "step-free" that turns out to have a single unmarked step is worse than no accessibility information at all, because it replaces caution with false confidence. That is why every route attribute in Hospital WayfinderIQ is tied to a verified estate record, not inferred from a floor plan or assumed from a building's age.

Where we cannot verify an attribute — a lift's current working status, for example, during building work — we say so, rather than presenting a route with unstated confidence. The interface distinguishes clearly between "verified step-free", "currently unconfirmed" and "not step-free", and never silently substitutes one for another to make a route look more complete.

This matters because a hard constraint, once chosen, should stay a hard constraint. If a user asks for a step-free route and none exists to their destination, the honest answer is to say so and offer a human-assisted alternative — not to quietly return the shortest route with stairs in it because it is technically the fastest option.

Genuine accessibility work also means testing with disabled people, not just auditing against a checklist. Standards conformance tells you a route can be technically accessed; task-based testing with people with lived experience tells you whether it is actually usable under real conditions — and the two do not always agree.