We'd like to use analytics cookies to understand which symbols people look up, so we know what to research next. They are not used for advertising and we set none of them unless you say yes. What we store.
A stylised white figure in a wheelchair on a blue square background, indicating accessible facilities.
Also known as: Wheelchair symbol, Handicap symbol, Accessibility symbol, Accessible symbol, Blue wheelchair sign
Designed in 1968 by Danish design student Susanne Koefoed for a Rehabilitation International design competition, the International Symbol of Access indicates facilities, parking, entrances or services that are accessible to wheelchair users, and by extension often to disabled people more broadly.
Indicates a facility, parking space, entrance or service that is accessible to wheelchair users.
Contexts: Public information
Designed by Danish design student Susanne Koefoed in 1968 for a Rehabilitation International competition; the original design lacked a head on the seated figure, which was added shortly after to 'humanise' it before formal adoption in 1969.
1968–1969
Was drawn in 1968 by Susanne Koefoed, a Danish design student, as an entry to a competition run by Rehabilitation International, and originally had no head — it was a wheelchair and a seated body. The head was added the following year by Karl Montan of the Swedish Handicap Institute, on the reasoning that a figure without one reads as furniture rather than as a person.
Denmark and Sweden · 1968–1969 · Contexts: Public information
Is registered as a public information symbol by the International Organization for Standardization, which is why the same drawing appears on signage in countries whose languages and alphabets share nothing.
Contexts: Public information
Does not mean 'for wheelchair users only'. On a lavatory door, a parking bay, a lift or a ticket window it marks a facility that is usable by disabled people generally — including people with no visible impairment at all — and treating the wheelchair literally is the commonest misreading of the mark.
Contexts: Public information
Related forms that are not treated as separate canonical symbols — see our variant rules.
Dynamic/active accessibility symbol
An unofficial, widely adopted redesign showing the figure leaning forward as if propelling the wheelchair, used by some cities and organisations alongside or instead of the original static design.
Headless 1968 original
Susanne Koefoed's competition drawing, a wheelchair with a seated body and no head. Superseded within a year and now seen only in design histories.
Accessible Icon Project active form
A redrawn figure leaning forward with arms back, as though propelling the chair. Adopted by New York State and by a number of American cities and institutions, and not adopted by the ISO — so both marks are in current use side by side.
A simplified white silhouette of a person seated in a wheelchair, shown on a blue square background.
One is the ISO-registered figure sitting upright; the other is a campaign redesign showing the same figure in motion.
In 2014, New York became the first US state to require newly installed or replaced accessibility signage to use the 'Accessible Icon' — a redesigned, forward-leaning wheelchair figure distinct from the original International Symbol of Access — and to prohibit the word 'handicapped' on such signage. The redesign grew out of a grassroots street-art initiative, the Accessible Icon Project.