Accessible Poland: Redesigning Trains, Museums & Cities for the Disabled

wroclaw-przyjazny-niepelnosprawnym-fot-wroclaw-pl2.JPG, default, Disabled-friendly Wrocław, photo: wroclaw.pl

Over the last few years, public spaces, including museums, but also stations and city centres all across Poland have been gradually implementing new solutions to transform them into more welcoming places for people with a range of disabilities. With the country continuing to make strides in its drive towards accessibility, Culture.pl takes a look at some of the changes.

Trains & railway stations

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Chojnów railway station, photo: press materials

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Poland’s railway stations have been undergoing significant changes towards greater accessibility in the last decade, with the rebuilding of Kraków’s, Gdynia’s and Wrocław’s train stations among the first investments in which emphasis was placed on adapting rail buildings for travellers with disabilities. A further 100 stations were transformed with these needs in mind between 2010 and 2015.

But the greatest transformation has been as a result of the Stations Investment Programme (PID) for the years 2016-2023, Poland’s biggest investment in railway stations to date, which has seen the modernisation and building of nearly 200 ‘friendly’ train stations around the country.

Among the accessibility features added have been straightforward solutions like disabled toilets, additional disabled parking spaces and a dedicated room for parents and children, and less obvious ones like the removal of architectural barriers, installation of lifts and ramps, new signs in Braille and 3D plans of station buildings. New guidance paths have also appeared in the interior of stations to help lesser-abled passengers to better navigate their surroundings.

By the end of the programme, 400 stations, or 70% of the stations governed by Polish State Railways, Poland’s main railway managing group, was made accessible for people with mobility issues, whilst in the case of other adjustments such as special lanes for the visually impaired, over 150% of stations will use the solution, meaning some have more than one of these solutions.

Trains themselves are also becoming more accessible. As part of the PID programme, 700 train wagons were modernised and 185 new ones purchased, a proportion of which were superior standard COMBI wagons. In 2021, Polish State Railways picked up an order for 90 Combo train wagons bearing the ‘transport without barriers’ certificate which ensured they were adapted for the needs of the disabled, elderly and those with young children, with the main features including designated spaces for wheelchair users and seats for their carers, automatic wagon doors, floors without raised thresholds, specially adapted toilets and hand-rails at the right level.

According to statistics collected by Polish State Railways, disabled travellers have increasingly been choosing to take journeys by train. For example, the number of passengers who identified themselves as disabled increased by 84% in the first four quarters of 2021 in comparison to the same period the previous year.

Open & accessible museums

Museums have also increasingly been employing provisions for visitors with disabilities as a priority in recent years, with many of the country’s best known museums taking steps to become more accessible.

Among them, the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw has been one of those leading the way in its multi-year commitment to putting solutions in place for a wide spectrum of disabilities including disabilities of movement, sight, hearing, learning difficulties and autism, finding new ways to better serve disabled visitors’ needs and proactively engaging these visitors by researching and listening to their needs and working alongside NGOs active on their behalf.

In March 2014, Poland’s first national conference to discuss how to improve access to museums for disabled people was held at POLIN (at the time called the Museum of the History of Polish Jews) with the participation of museum representatives from around Poland who presented and discussed practical solutions to the issue. Since then, many improvements have been made.

According to data collected by Poland’s Central Statistical Office (GUS) for 2010, at that time only a third of museums in Poland had been adapted for people on wheelchairs and only 11% of museums had provisions for the blind and visually impaired. But this had substantially risen by 2018, when the Museum Statistics Survey carried out by the National Institute of Museology and Protection of Archives on around a quarter of Poland’s museums, found that 47% of museums had some of their buildings adapted for disabled visitors.

Of this 47%, 85% had adapted the front of the building for disabled access and almost 80% had disabled toilets. On the other hand 55% of all museums surveyed said they had adapted exhibition spaces for those with disabilities and of this number 62% had adapted at least some of them.

An example of one of the more innovative results of POLIN’s improvements for visitors with disabilities has been the museum’s production of an innovative set of multisensory typhlographic boards to enable visually-impaired visitors to better ‘see’ an exhibition. Typhlography is a special printing technique or the adaptation of a real picture in 3D form to help those who cannot see with their eyes to see by touch.

After consultation with visually-impaired visitors at past exhibitions, the museum found that traditional typhlographics were inadequate as they were hard to read and understand, and didn’t allow the user to recreate more metaphorical pictures in their imagination.

The typhlographic boards used at POLIN’s temporary exhibition Such A Landscape, which displayed paintings by Wilhelm Sasnal, were therefore specially designed with multiple layers and from multiple materials like wood, sand and pieces of cloth to stimulate the imagination and allow visitors to better understand the presented works by ‘feeling’ the strokes of a paintbrush, the temperature of a particular colour, and the feelings and emotions contained within the image.

Seeking to bring itself closer to visitors with disabilities in its quest to be an ‘open museum’, POLIN also organises regular workshops and events for people with disabilities. One of these is a concert for children with autism which is friendly to the senses, with a specially-selected musical repertoire in which the pitch, loudness and tone is maintained at the appropriate level in an environment with limited lighting effects and adapted to children with a heightened sensory stimulation threshold.

In 2021, the sensory concert received a distinction in the music category from the jury of the Słoneczniki competition in which parents and carers of Warsaw vote on the best developmental initiatives for children.

Most of Poland’s museums now offer at least some service and facilities for disabled visitors with more being updated all the time. Other services introduced by the National Museum of Warsaw, in addition to a typhlographic plan of the museum, were a quiet room for families and visitors with autism, induction loops, and electronic magnifying glasses to help those with weaker eye-sight to better see the details of paintings.

Accessible cities

Warsaw, Wrocław, Poznań and Gdynia are among the Polish cities which stand out as having received public recognition for their efforts in building accessibility for their residents. For example, almost all have also featured in the European Commission’s Access City Award which awards the most accessible European cities for seniors and those with disabilities.

Warsaw won the Access City Award for 2020, chosen in November 2019, for its strategy of involving people with disabilities in its plans to make the city more accessible and showing how much can be achieved in a short period of time, meanwhile in December 2020, two Polish cities were distinguished for 2021, Gdynia in third place and Poznań with a special mention.

Gdynia, who found itself in the final of the Access City Award for the third time (also in 2012 and 2018), was praised for raising societal awareness around disability and its consistent actions towards improving accessibility, and in the past has been honoured for widening access for people with intellectual disabilities and initiatives to make its transport more accessible.

On the other hand, Poznań received a special award in 2021 for its work in making public services accessible during the pandemic – for example, daily updates about the pandemic on the city’s official channels were always translated into sign language, there was a helpline for how to use online and digital services, there was help shopping for seniors, and a phone line for people feeling isolated and lonely and wanting to talk to someone about their problems and daily life.

Poznań also received third place in 2014 when the city was distinguished for the progress it had made in developing an accessible city and prioritising accessibility for disabled people and seniors in its future city strategies. It was also praised for existing features like 100% low-floor city buses, the pledge to replace all city trams to low-floor ones and accessibility transformations made to architecturally-challenging public buildings including Poznań’s Imperial Castle.

Wrocław is a Polish city which for a long time has also been visibly active in promoting and developing greater accessibility. Since 2010, the city has organised its own Wrocław without Barriers awards, given to public and private sector organisations and initiatives which have made the greatest contribution to becoming more accessible in the previous year. They were founded by the spokesman to the president of Wrocław, who was also a recognised activist in Poland for people with disabilities and the issue of accessibility.

Demonstrating its commitment to accessibility, in 2019 the city was also the sixth in Poland to publish a document setting out standards for the design of public spaces and the renovation of existing buildings to ensure their accessibility for the lesser abled. In 2021, it also launched the ‘Wrocław without Barriers are its People’ social awareness campaign to make people more aware of the needs of disabled people in public spaces and how best to integrate them.

National parks & green spaces

Poland’s national parks are also part of Poland’s accessible transformation, with a project that spanned 2021 to 2023 focusing on closing the accessibility gap still found in many national parks. Ten national parks received funding as part of the project.

In some national parks, like the Tatry Mountains National Park, innovative solutions tested have included a specially-adapted wheelchair to open up mountaineering to more people with disabilities of mobility, who were usually only able to make use of two mountain trails in the Tatra National Park.

Another trend which can also be seen around Poland is the emergence of ‘Sensory Parks’ for children and sometimes adults with all types of sensory disabilities. They are designed to serve a rehabilitative and therapeutic function by stimulating other functioning senses and develop emotions and imaginations through the use of different surfaces, smells and colours. The parks are also often designed to have an area for people and children on wheelchairs.

Written by Blanka Konopka, Feb 2022, updated March 2026

Sources: PKP.pl, pap.pl, niepelnosprawni.pl, stat.gov.pl, statystykamuzeow.pl, polin.pl, mnw.art.pl, gdynia.pl, poznan.pl, wroclaw.pl, tpn.pl

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