How to plan accessible wayfinding in a venue

Who you are designing for

Accessibility in wayfinding is not one feature. Different visitors fail at different points, so start by listing who comes to your building and where each of them gets stuck today.

None of these is a niche. In a hospital outpatients department on a weekday morning, most of them are in the queue at once.

Step-free is a rule, not a preference

A step-free option that only prefers lifts will, sooner or later, send someone to a staircase, because the stairs were the only way the route could be finished. For a wheelchair user, that route ends at the foot of the stairs.

In DigiMaps, switching step-free on makes it a hard constraint. A wheelchair route never uses a stepped link, even when that is the only way through. If no step-free way exists, the kiosk shows a best-effort route and flags it clearly, rather than presenting stairs as step-free. For that to work, the map data has to be honest too:

1. Every stair and escalator link is marked as stepped.
2. Every lift is linked on every floor it serves, so the router can use it.
3. Ramps and level thresholds are drawn where they really are.
4. When a lift goes out of service, it is posted as a live closure, and step-free routes move to another lift within seconds, without a new map release.

Six routing profiles

One route rarely suits everyone. DigiMaps calculates routes for six profiles, and the visitor picks one. A kiosk can also be set to start with step-free on.

Visitors can also ask for the fewest floor changes, prefer indoor or shaded paths, and add a stop on the way, such as the nearest prayer room or restroom. The campus and office industry packs leave out the stroller profile.

Bring the controls down to a seated visitor

A portrait kiosk is tall for a reason: it is seen from across a lobby. That same height puts the search box and the keyboard out of reach for someone seated. The fix is to move the controls, not the visitor.

SheetA11Y-02 DrawingPortrait kiosk, Controls within reach

1. 1Upper half: the map. The route stays visible above the controls at Full HD and 4K.
2. 2Lower half: every control. Search, the six home tiles and the directions panel move below the line.
3. 3The dock. Home, Search, Directory, language, Accessibility and Help, all within reach.
4. 4Mounting height. Set by your building standard and checked with a seated tester, not by the software.
5. 5Approach space. Room in front of the kiosk for a wheelchair to pull up; also a site decision.

DigiMaps calls this Controls within reach. One Accessible mode switch turns it on together with larger text, step-free routes and spoken directions, and each part also works on its own. Every setting belongs to one visitor and resets when the session ends, so the next person starts from the standard screen.

The software can only do half the job. Mounting height, the space to pull a wheelchair up to the screen and the screen’s tilt belong on the installation drawing, set from your building standard and checked with a seated tester before sign-off.

Contrast, text size and touch targets

Contrast is the easiest part of screen accessibility to measure. WCAG 2.1 expresses it as a ratio between text and background: at least 4.5:1 for normal text, and 7:1 for its enhanced level.

• Pharmacy, Level 1 Black on signage yellow #000000 on #ffd400 14.6:1 Meets 7:1
• Pharmacy, Level 1 White on navy #ffffff on #0b1730 17.8:1 Meets 7:1
• Pharmacy, Level 1 Slate grey on white #5e6577 on #ffffff 5.8:1 Meets 4.5:1 only
• Pharmacy, Level 1 Mid grey on white #7a7f8c on #ffffff 4.0:1 Below 4.5:1
• Pharmacy, Level 1 Amber on white #ffb81c on #ffffff 1.7:1 Below 4.5:1

On a DigiMaps kiosk, the numbers that matter are these:

• Text is never smaller than 20 CSS px, and touch targets are at least 56 px.
• High contrast switches to black and yellow, and every text and surface pair is at least 7:1.
• The sunlight theme for outdoor screens keeps every pair at 7:1 or better, whatever accent colour the venue uses.

Printed signs are measured differently. The Dubai Health Authority’s guidelines for health facilities, for example, ask for a minimum luminance contrast of 30% between lettering and background on signs. That is a different measure from a WCAG ratio, so do not convert one into the other; check each against its own rule.

Directions people can hear

Listen reads a place card or a route aloud in the visitor’s language, and Speak directions reads each new route as it appears. Both use the text-to-speech voices installed on the kiosk, which has two practical consequences:

1. If the kiosk has no voice for a language, the Listen button is hidden for that language rather than reading Arabic with an English voice.
2. Voice quality depends on the device. Check Arabic, Hindi or any other language on the hardware you are buying, not on a laptop.

There is no voice input or spoken search. And a talking kiosk does not replace tactile and braille signage or a staffed help point for blind visitors; it helps some partially sighted visitors, and a QR code moves the route to their own phone, where they can zoom the text.

Calm, Easy read and language

Calm mode removes map motion and animations, which helps visitors who find moving screens hard; on phones, the operating system’s reduced-motion setting is honoured. Easy read uses pictures and short words.

Language is an access need too. Directions name real landmarks in the visitor’s language, and Arabic directions never fall back to Latin labels from the CAD drawing. The layout mirrors fully for right-to-left scripts. For physical signs in Dubai’s health facilities, the DHA guidelines place the Arabic text above the English; on a kiosk, the attract screen and emergency messages show every venue language at once.

Emergencies: an accessible route to an accessible exit

An emergency message that is only announced over the PA does not reach a Deaf visitor. A text takeover on every screen, in every venue language, reaches anyone who can see a screen. “Show me the way out” routes to the nearest reachable exit, and it needs approved exit data from your fire plan to do so.

For hospitals, the life-safety profile adds a rule DigiMaps will not let anyone override: a map cannot be published unless every point on it has an accessible route to an accessible exit, as well as two ways out. All of this supplements, never replaces, your approved signage and procedures.

Standards to read before you write the specification

DigiMaps does not claim compliance with any of these documents. They are what your architect, access consultant and IT team will check the project against, so it is worth knowing which ones apply before you write requirements.

On WCAG, our position is plain: DigiMaps is designed to support WCAG 2.1 AA, with automated accessibility checks in our build pipeline. It has not had a third-party audit yet, so ask any vendor, us included, what has actually been tested and by whom. The features themselves are described on our accessible wayfinding page.

Test it with the people who will use it

Many accessibility problems only show up on site, with the real screen at its real mounting height. Run these checks before go-live, and repeat the first three whenever the map changes.

1. Sit in a wheelchair, or a chair of the same height, at every kiosk and complete a search using only the lower half of the screen.
2. Route from each kiosk to your ten most-visited destinations with the wheelchair profile. Every route should use a lift or a ramp.
3. Post a lift closure in Studio and repeat two of those routes. They should move to another lift, or say plainly that no step-free route exists.
4. Turn on high contrast at the brightest kiosk at midday, and the sunlight theme on any outdoor screen.
5. Press Listen in every venue language on the actual hardware. Where the button is missing, no voice is installed for that language.
6. Walk away from the kiosk for longer than its reset time (60 seconds by default) and come back. Every accessibility setting should be off for the next visitor.
7. Scan the QR code with step-free on and check that the route on the phone is still step-free.
8. Ask three people who use these features every day to try it: a wheelchair user, a visitor with low vision and someone who reads Arabic first. Note every place they hesitate.

The full kiosk test, accessibility included, is in our site acceptance test checklist.

Sources

Checked 24 October 2026.

• Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, Harmonised Guidelines and Standards for Universal Accessibility in India, 2021
• Dubai Municipality, Dubai Universal Design Code
• Dubai Health Authority, Health Facility Guidelines, Part C, section 5: Signage, version 1.0
• W3C, Understanding Success Criterion 1.4.6: Contrast (Enhanced)