Travel Made Easy for the Visually Impaired with OpenStreetMap

World-Map- Explorer is an open source, screen reader- enabled map built to help the visually impaired and keyboard-first users explore the world.

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Picture this: You’re planning a trip to Goa, and like millions of others, you pull up a digital map on your phone. You pinch, swipe, scroll, zoom and tap on the online map to explore. In a matter of a few minutes, you’ve traced the beaches, markets, restaurants, and mentally bookmarked your evening plans.

Now imagine the same scenario, but you can’t see the screen. Traditional maps are visual by design, leaving 285 million people worldwide living with visual impairments locked out of one of our most fundamental tools for understanding place and space. This is what the World-Map-Explorer is solving for — an open source product that reimagines digital maps through an inclusive design that uses sound and keyboard navigation for user interaction.

The architecture of inclusion

Behind the product’s deceptively simple interface lies sophisticated technology. The platform leverages Leaflet, Wikidata, Nominatim, Valhalla routing API, Turf.js, Overpass API, etc, drawing from the vast OpenStreetMap database to create something unprecedented: a fully keyboard-navigable map that speaks.