Accessible Community is committed to nurturing disability-friendly communities through ethical technology. loca11y, a tool for connecting people with disabilities to the local businesses and organizations that are serving them, relies on a mapping of accessibility requirements to disabilities. Unlike many functional needs mappings, our tools require a taxonomy that includes both physical and digital environments including facilities, events, websites, social media, and accommodations.

The taxonomy has to be detailed enough that we can map accessibility requirements to functional needs but clear and usable enough that a wide audience of people with disabilities could use it successfully. We have used a multi-level approach to meet these needs.

This work resulted in useable, a multi-level disability needs taxonomy. To celebrate disability pride month and to encourage more disability-centered tools, we are sharing our mapping in an open source GitHub repository. There is currently a JSON structure that can be incorporated into various tools by simply downloading it.

useable is a work in progress. We encourage anyone interested to review and comment on it. We will incorporate comments and feedback. Our goal is that useable will aid in worldwide tool development of disability-centered applications.

If you are interested in supporting Accessible Community’s work, please support us by volunteering or donating.