Every visitor should get a route they can actually take.

What a step-free route is

A step-free route will not send a visitor up any stairs, over any curb, or along any other stretch your team has marked as a barrier. It serves visitors who use wheelchairs or walkers, parents pushing strollers, and anyone else who needs a way through without steps.

A barrier is anything a wheelchair cannot get through: stairs, a curb, a gravel path, a heavy door, a narrow gate, a slope that is simply too steep.

Step-free routing is the same routing that answers Navigate for everyone else, with the marked stretches taken out, so there is no second accessible map to keep up.

Mark each barrier where it actually is

Almost every real barrier sits between two places. A flight of stairs between two terraces, a curb between the parking lot and the lawn: both ends are usable, and only the stretch joining them is the problem.

So the mark goes on that stretch. Open Accessible Routing in the editor and stand on a point, and there is one switch for each way out of it. Switch on the ones that are blocked, and step-free routes avoid those stretches while the places at both ends stay reachable by every other path. If a building has three ways in and one has stairs, mark that one, and a visitor in a wheelchair arrives by one of the other two.

One mark covers both directions. Where direction matters, a single press switches it to One way: a curb a wheelchair can roll down but not up, or a door that only opens one way.

When a place has no step-free way in at all, like a shop up three steps with no ramp, switch on every way out of it, and step-free routes can no longer reach it. Managers can mark the same things from the Accessibility screen in the Front Desk, which has two marks: a place that cannot be reached without steps, and steps between two places.

Send visitors to a door they can use

Turn on the Destination switch for each real entrance, including the accessible one, so a visitor can pick it by name and be walked straight to it. Give that entrance the extra names people actually use, so a search finds the door you mean.

For parking, restrooms and the other nearby essentials you list in the Front Desk, choose the point at the entrance rather than the middle of the lot, and mark each one that is step-free to get in. A visitor who needs that can list only those.

What a visitor sees on the tour

The step-free option appears on its own the moment your tour has its first marked barrier, and it stays off until a visitor turns it on.

A visitor walking a step-free route on your grounds gets the same turn-by-turn directions as everyone else, with the distance to each turn in feet and spoken turns a visitor can switch off. Here is what changes once step-free routing is on:

• Every route plans around the stairs, curbs and barriers you marked, going the long way around where it has to.
• Moving freely obeys it too: tapping a blocked point brings up “Not accessible from here.”
• When a place can only be reached through a barrier, the tour says so instead of quietly routing through it: “No step-free route to this point.”
• The choice holds for the rest of the visit.

What your property should map

Partial is useful. A tour that knows about six flights of steps routes better than one that knows about none, so mark each one as your team notices it, after a walk or when somebody mentions it, and update the marks when a shop puts in a ramp.

Start with the places you already know are a problem. A good first pass covers:

• Every flight of stairs between two places, even two or three steps.
• Curbs with no ramp between a parking area, a sidewalk and a lawn.
• Gravel stretches, narrow gates and heavy doors.
• Slopes too steep to push up, set to One way where going down is fine.
• Any shop, building or cabin with no step-free way in.
• Each real entrance, with the accessible door named the way people say it.
• Parking and restrooms that are step-free to get in.

Keep the marks as current as the grounds

StrollPoint provides the marking, the routing and the switch visitors press. Whether each mark is right is up to the people who know the property, because nobody else can walk your grounds and see the curb.

The All blocked tab in the editor lists every mark in one place, and the Accessibility screen in the Front Desk keeps its marks in two tables on a single screen. That record is the promise the tour makes on your behalf. Read it before the tour goes live and again at the end of each season, and take off anything a new ramp or door has fixed.

The tour itself is scanned against WCAG 2.1 Level AA before every release, and our accessibility page explains what that testing covers.

Follow a route on a real property

Pick a destination in the Mackinac Island demo and follow the directions to see routing on a real property. When you are ready to map your own grounds, Dustin Mishler, our VP of Business Development, can walk you through it at [email protected] or 989-998-2469.

Common questions