Unverified accessibility claimsDisabled travellers can't tell what is really accessible
"Accessible" on a listing might mean a ramp, or one step, or a lift that has been broken for a month, or a toilet being used as a storeroom. The most reliable account usually comes from another disabled person who has actually been there. That knowledge exists in enormous quantity, scattered across forums, group chats and reviews, and the maps and guides that gather it cover only part of it, each in its own terms, so it is rarely there to check before leaving the house.
Framed by Ainna's innovation team
Who lives with it
Wheelchair users and people with limited mobility · blind, deaf and neurodivergent travellers and people with hidden disabilities · carers planning a trip · venues that are accessible and cannot prove it
Why now
Accessibility information is still largely self-declared by the venue, with no shared definition of what the word covers and little route for correction when it is wrong.
Why it matters
A sharply defined information gap with a motivated community already producing the data for free. Structure is most of the product, and the people who need it are the people best placed to build it.
On the Index
Framed by Ainna's innovation team from a condition most readers will recognise, so no source is claimed. Published in Edition 1.
Ainna frames what it reads; it does not report. Nothing on the Index comes from a user, and what you bring to Ainna is never published.
Utilities meter at the treatment works and at the customer's tap, and only coarsely in between: a district meter can say how much went missing across a whole area, not where. So loss is known as a percentage far more often than as a place, the response is scheduled rather than targeted (mains replaced by age, not by evidence), and too many leaks are found only when the road subsides or somebody rings.
For whomWater utilities and municipal engineers · households in intermittent-supply cities · regulators setting loss targets
Loss happens at the handovers: field to packer, packer to distributor, distributor to shelf. Every party measures only its own side of each one. So each set of numbers looks defensible while the total is enormous, and the interventions that would work are precisely the ones nobody can see, because they sit between two businesses rather than inside one.
For whomGrowers and packers · distributors and independent retailers · redistribution charities working the same corridors
Caring for an ageing parent means medications, appointments, home visits, bills and forms, shared between siblings in different cities and often different countries. It runs on a group chat, a shared folder and whoever remembers. Things fall through, one person quietly carries most of it, and the professionals involved each see a fragment of a picture nobody holds whole.
For whomAdult children caring for parents · home-care workers · family doctors seeing only their slice
