Map Apps and Visually Impaired Koreans

The group that most needs the alternative has the least of it

Korea’s digital divide survey asks people with disabilities whether they can use navigation and online map services. Broken down by type of disability, visually impaired respondents report the lowest ability of any group large enough to report on: 72.5%.

That is the finding on its own. It becomes more pointed when you set it against the other dataset we maintain — what Korea’s barrier-free tourism data actually records about physical wayfinding at the places people visit.

The two datasets come from different agencies, were collected for different purposes, and have never to our knowledge been published side by side. Neither was designed to answer the question we are putting to them, so we have kept the claim narrow and flagged the limits as we go.

Map app ability by type of disability

A 9.3-point gap separates physical from visual disability. This is not surprising — a map is a fundamentally visual object, and screen readers handle spatial interfaces worse than they handle text — but it is useful to have measured rather than assumed.

What Korean venues record about physical wayfinding

Korea publishes barrier-free accessibility details for tourist venues through the national tourism organisation. Our catalogue holds 9,677 venues from that source, of which 8,840 carry at least one accessibility detail. Each venue can record any of 28 different facility types. Here is everything relevant to visually impaired visitors.

For comparison, the most commonly recorded feature in the whole dataset is accessible routes into and around the site, at 7,115 venues — more than four times the braille-block count. Accessible parking is recorded at 5,398 venues and lifts at 2,900. Mobility provision is documented several times more thoroughly than visual provision.

Reading the two datasets together — carefully

Put simply: the group least able to substitute a phone for physical wayfinding is the group whose physical wayfinding is least documented. Large-print materials are recorded at 30 venues out of 9,677 — three hundredths of the dataset.

One caution on how far this goes. A low registration count is not proof that the facility is absent. Braille guide blocks are required at many Korean public buildings and are extremely common on pavements and in stations; the 17.8% figure describes what venues have written down, not what they have installed. The honest claim is about information, not concrete.

That distinction still matters practically, though, and in a direction that is easy to miss. If you are planning a visit and cannot assess a venue on arrival by looking around, undocumented is functionally the same as unavailable — you have no way to find out in advance. For a sighted visitor a missing record is an inconvenience. For a blind visitor it is the whole problem.

Guide dogs: a legal right, recorded at one venue in eight

The guide-dog line in the table above deserves its own section, because the gap it exposes is not between provision and non-provision. It is between a right that already exists everywhere and information about that right existing almost nowhere.

Under Article 40 of Korea’s Act on Welfare of Persons with Disabilities, refusing entry to a person accompanied by a certified guide dog — on public transport, in public places, in accommodation, or in food-service premises — is prohibited without justifiable cause. The penalty is a fine of up to 3 million won. The right does not depend on a venue opting in.

Yet only 1,187 of 9,677 venues (12.3%) in the barrier-free dataset record anything about guide-dog access. Seven venues in eight publish nothing on a question whose legal answer is already settled.

Enforcement is correspondingly thin. Reporting on figures released to the National Assembly, Korean disability media put the number of fines actually issued for refusing guide-dog entry at 18 nationwide between 2020 and May 2025 — mostly restaurants, with a handful of hotels, one large supermarket and one transport case.

The practical effect for a guide-dog user planning a day out is that the law is on their side and the data is not. They can insist on entry, but they cannot check in advance which venues will make that unnecessary — and having to assert a legal right at the door is a materially different experience from knowing you are expected.

This is the clearest case we have found of a documentation gap rather than a facilities gap, and it is the cheapest kind to close. No construction is required. A venue simply has to record what is already legally true.

What we do about it, and what we cannot

• We show the accessibility details that exist rather than summarising them into a score. A single “accessible” badge would hide exactly the distinction this article is about.
• We label absent data as absent, never as “no”. Wherever you see a feature missing in our listings, it means unrecorded.
• Voice input is not a garnish. For anyone who cannot comfortably read a map, saying what you need is the primary interface, not a shortcut.
• We cannot fix the source data. The 30 large-print entries are what Korea has published. Improving that requires venues to report, which is a policy problem rather than a software one.

If you use a screen reader and something on our app does not work with it, telling us is genuinely the most useful thing you can do. Accessibility bugs are the category most likely to go unreported and least likely to be caught by the people who wrote the code.

Sources and method

• Survey source: 2025 Digital Information Divide Survey, Ministry of Science and ICT / National Information Society Agency, national approved statistic no. 120017 — microdata on Korea’s public data portal. Figures are our own weighted aggregation of the respondent-level responses, not a published index.
• Venue source: 한국관광공사_무장애 여행 정보 — Korea Tourism Organization barrier-free travel information, covering 9,677 venues in our catalogue.
• Guide-dog law: Act on Welfare of Persons with Disabilities, Article 40 on Korea’s national law portal. The enforcement figure is as reported by Korean disability media from data released to the National Assembly, and we have not independently verified it.
• Counts taken on 6 August 2026. A venue counts toward a feature only where that feature is explicitly recorded.