About
One person, 108 guides, and one rule that doesn't bend.
Why this exists
Plenty of apps will tell you what's good near you. Very few will tell you whether you can get in. The ones that try usually reduce it to a single wheelchair icon, which says nothing about the gradient of the ramp, whether there's anywhere to sit, or whether the room will be too loud to stay in.
Wayfind is a travel planner first — the trip is the thing you're building, and accessibility information is carried on the places inside it rather than living in a separate mode. That's deliberate. The same facts that let a wheelchair user plan a day tell everyone else whether they can get a suitcase to the room, and a product that serves both is one people will actually keep using.
Someone who needs this should open it and immediately see that it takes them seriously. Someone who doesn't should never feel they've opened the wrong app. Both have to be true at once, or it doesn't work.
Who builds it
Derek Roper, alone. The iOS app, the 108 guides across 57 countries, this website and the community forum. No company, no investors, no growth team.
That has an upside and a downside worth being straight about. The upside is there's nobody to overrule a decision like “access data stays free”. The downside is that replies take a day or two, and 108 guides is more than one person can keep perfectly current — which is what the next section is about.
The assistant, and its limits
Some of the work of keeping this running is done by an AI agent. Rather than let you discover that by accident, here is exactly what it does.
What it does
- Watches the guides for staleness and flags ones that need a human to revisit them.
- Drafts new guides and updates as proposals, which a person reviews before anything publishes.
- Handles forum housekeeping — tagging, categorising, spam triage, flagging threads nobody has answered.
- Answers product and logistics questions in the forum: how filters work, what's in Pro, why sync failed.
- Turns recurring problems into tracked issues, and sometimes into a pull request a human reviews.
What it is not allowed to do
It never answers an access question
Terrain, surfaces, step counts, gradients, noise, sensory detail — these go to a person who has been there, or to a review queue. Never to a generated answer. A wrong access claim doesn't waste an evening; it strands someone.
It never pretends to be a member
It posts from one clearly labeled staff account whose bio says plainly that its replies are AI-drafted with human oversight. It does not upvote, does not start conversations to make the forum look busier, and does not hold opinions about places it has not been.
It says when it doesn't know
Answers are grounded in published guides, the FAQ and resolved threads. If it can't ground an answer, it doesn't improvise one — the question goes to a human instead.
Nothing ships without review
Content changes arrive as pull requests. Support replies started life in a review queue where a person approved every one before it posted, and categories only became auto-posting after weeks of evidence they were reliable.
How to help
The most valuable thing anyone can give this project is a first-hand correction. If you've been somewhere and the guide is wrong — the elevator's been out since spring, the step-free entrance is round the back now, the “quiet room” is next to the kitchen — post it in the forum. It reaches the next traveler immediately and gets folded into the guide.