Access Trax

Wheelchair users lay down Access Trax fold-up mats so they can cross sand or grass when public paths have no ramps.

ENABLE Model location

• Navigator-side Compensations → Use Assistive Technologies
• Navigator-side Compensations → Create Workarounds

What it is

Kelly Twichel and Eric Packard, then graduate students in occupational therapy at the University of St. Augustine for Health Sciences in San Marcos, California, built the first Access Trax prototypes in 2016 when a professor challenged the class to solve a specific problem: adaptive surfers in San Diego could not reach the water. Twichel and Packard assembled 10-by-4-foot mesh mat prototypes and tested them at a surf competition at Ocean Beach. An adaptive surfer at that first demonstration told Twichel, "this is the first time in over 10 years that I've been able to get down to the water and across the sand in my wheelchair."¹ Twichel incorporated the company in 2018, initially named Beach Trax before expanding to Access Trax. The company now operates out of La Mesa in San Diego County.

The product consists of connectable 3-by-3-foot accordion-fold blocks, each weighing 5.2 pounds and priced at approximately $73. A typical setup of 10 connected panels costs around $650. One person can carry, deploy, and retrieve a full pathway. The mats work on sand, gravel, grass, mulch, dirt, and snow.

Wheelchair users and their companions deploy Access Trax as a navigator-side compensation, carrying and laying their own temporary infrastructure to reach terrain that public agencies have not equipped with permanent access routes. The users most commonly deploy the mats to reach shorelines at beaches, waterways in parks, and outdoor event spaces. Carrying and laying the mats constitutes a user workaround for the regulatory gap that leaves most state and local beach access routes without enforceable standards.

Why it matters

American beaches became legally obligated to provide some form of access to people with disabilities when Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, but the Act's original text and the 1991 technical standards that followed addressed buildings and fixed facilities rather than shorelines and soft terrain. The federal agency responsible for setting accessibility standards, the U.S. Access Board, did not publish binding outdoor-access standards until November 2013, and those standards, incorporated into the Architectural Barriers Act, applied only to federal land managed by agencies like the National Park Service.² State and local governments, which control most of the United States' more than 95,000 miles of shoreline, operate under Title II's general non-discrimination obligation but face no enforceable technical specification for beach access routes.³ Builders who would have needed to commit to design decisions that stabilized soft terrain faced no mandatory standard compelling them to do so. Municipal beaches remained in this regulatory gap when Twichel and Packard built their first prototypes. Access Trax entered the market because of that gap.⁴

Urban planners and park designers who built American public beaches during the postwar decades made choices about surface material, path routing, and facility placement that concentrated inaccessibility in predictable ways. Those design decisions encoded a built environment organized around ambulatory bodies, and the entities that financed and approved those designs rarely included wheelchair users in their planning processes. The ADA's passage did not prompt mass redesign. It prompted compliance audits focused on parking lots, restrooms, and entrance ramps, leaving the beach surface itself largely unchanged. Many municipalities that have since installed some form of beach access mat treat it as a charitable amenity funded by donations and grants rather than a legal obligation funded from the parks operating budget.⁵ Cory Lee, an accessibility travel blogger who uses a power wheelchair and has Spinal Muscular Atrophy, documented this pattern after trying Access Trax at Mission Beach: "So often those beach access mats at different destinations, they don't go close enough to the water. They're pretty far up on the sand."⁶ Wheelchair users who reach the mat's stopping point and cannot proceed further endure inaccessibility at the exact threshold where builder-side provision ended. The mat's stopping point reveals the boundary of an institution's willingness to commit, not the technical limit of what a mat can do.

American disability accommodation has long sorted into two tiers: mandatory structural provision, enforceable through litigation, and voluntary provision, funded through charity and positioned as beneficence. When requirement-setting fails to establish technical standards for a specific context, the voluntary tier expands to fill the space. The NDI found in 2020 that households with an adult with a work-disability require on average 28 percent more income, or approximately $17,690 per year at median, to maintain equivalent living standards as comparable households without a disabled member.⁷ Access Trax at $73 per block sits within that larger cost structure: disabled beachgoers purchasing portable infrastructure that the public beach should have built permanently. A municipal-grade roll-out beach mat suitable for one beachfront installation typically costs between $4,000 and $20,000.⁸ The Madeira Beach, Florida installation was purchased through a private foundation donation, not a parks budget.⁵ When the cost of accessible public infrastructure falls to individual families or private foundations rather than public agencies, the arrangement concentrates the burden on the people who already carry the most.⁷

Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch's "Crip Technoscience Manifesto," published in Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience in 2019, argues that disabled people have long been positioned as users of technology rather than makers of it, and that crip technoscience names the practice of disabled people and their allies designing access solutions that alter built environments rather than waiting for those environments to be fixed.⁹ Access Trax occupies a contested position within that framework. Twichel and Packard designed the mats in response to a specific, documented barrier and tested them with the people who would use them. The product enables beach access for people for whom no other option exists. At the same time, Marta Russell argued in Capitalism and Disability (Haymarket Books, 2019) that the AT market functions as a mechanism for extracting value from the gap between public obligation and public provision: the rehabilitation and assistive technology industry is a multi-billion-dollar economy built on managing disabled bodies in the absence of structural remedies.¹⁰ Access Trax generating revenue at $73 per block across 17 countries sits inside the market structure Russell identified: a product economy built on managing disabled bodies in the space public provision left unfilled.

Gaochao Zhang and colleagues at the University of Copenhagen, reviewing 27 studies in a 2017 systematic review published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, found that people with mobility impairments who access nature report improved strength, stamina, cardiorespiratory capacity, and mood, along with reduced isolation and enhanced social interaction.¹¹ The review identified inaccessible slopes and uneven surfaces as primary barriers driving exclusion from those benefits. A 2022 systematic review in Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences found that cardiovascular disease constitutes a major cause of morbidity and mortality among wheelchair users, and that half of wheelchair users with chronic spinal cord injury report no leisure-time physical activity, with inaccessible environments explicitly identified as a driver of inactivity.¹² The beach mat that a wheelchair user carries and lays down and retrieves is a response to a harm that the public record documents as clinically consequential. Wheelchair users who cannot reach outdoor recreation sites endure inaccessibility that accumulates biologically: cardiovascular risk rises, physical activity falls below thresholds associated with health maintenance, and these costs compound the financial ones the NDI quantified.⁷ The bodies absorbing this differential risk are those whose mobility impairments already concentrate health vulnerability, and the structural arrangement producing that concentration, underfunded public beach accessibility, remains largely intact.

Access Trax now sells in 17 countries. Quinn Waitley, a professional adaptive surfer, put the product's position plainly: "Honestly we need all of it."⁶ The mat enables beach access for people who have no other current option, without requiring any public agency to change its design or budget. The structural conditions that produce that gap define the current frontier. Permanent beach access routes on state and local beaches would require either enforceable technical standards that do not currently exist, public agency budget commitments that rarely materialize, or litigation under Title II that remains difficult without specific standards to cite. Access Trax operates in the gap those conditions produce, enabling individual crossings while the structural arrangement that makes each crossing necessary stays in place.

Real-world examples

In the news

Accessibility Technology Ensures Everyone Gets a Day at the Beach (April 2024)
-- Nina R. Dietz, Sierra Club

• Dietz documents Cory Lee, an accessibility travel blogger who uses a power wheelchair and has Spinal Muscular Atrophy, using Access Trax mats at Mission Beach in San Diego. Lee reports that the mats "completely opened up beaches for me and made me really fall in love with going to the beach again." The article also covers professional adaptive surfer Quinn Waitley and Access Trax founder Kelly Twichel's account of her mother's first beach visit after a stroke. Dietz notes that the ADA became law 34 years before her reporting, yet no specific enforceable beach access standards apply to state and local beaches. The article connects individual assistive-technology use to the structural gap in requirement-setting for outdoor access.

In the news

Changemakers: A California Occupational Therapist Has an Invention to Help People with Disabilities Reach the Sea (January 2022)
-- Skyler Rossi, Times of Entrepreneurship

• Rossi reports on Access Trax founder Kelly Twichel's founding story, from her 2016 graduate school prototype to the company's 2018 launch. An adaptive surfer at the first Ocean Beach demonstration told Twichel: "this is the first time in over 10 years that I've been able to get down to the water and across the sand in my wheelchair." Rossi details product specifications ($73/block, 5.2 lb, 3×3 ft connectable panels manufactured in San Diego) and business milestones including a $50,000 FedEx Small Business Grant and more than $100,000 in revenue. The piece illustrates how an occupational therapist built a user workaround into a product that substitutes for absent public infrastructure.

• Cory Lee documented wheelchair-accessible options at San Diego beaches in a December 2022 guide on Curb Free with Cory Lee,¹³ noting where Access Trax mats and beach wheelchairs were available at specific locations, illustrating how disabled travelers must research and plan around accessibility gaps that non-disabled visitors encounter already solved.

• The 2013 ABA outdoor access standards, the only U.S. rules with specific technical requirements for beach access routes, apply solely to federal land. The Northeast ADA Center confirmed in a published Q&A that state and local government beaches have no equivalent enforceable standard, only a general obligation under Title II not to discriminate.²

• Gulf Shores, Alabama began installing permanent beach access mats in 2018. As of 2024, four mats cover one 5-foot-by-50-foot route and three 5-foot-by-100-foot routes, representing the city's current infrastructure commitment. The installation represents the kind of builder-side provision that removes the need for individuals to carry their own equipment, and its existence is exceptional rather than typical.¹⁴

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the design and requirement-setting stages involves public agencies committing to permanent accessible infrastructure before spaces open to the public:

• "We are specifying a permanent beach access route as part of the construction contract. The route runs from the parking lot to the mean high water line before the park opens."
• "Our accessibility review requires that every new beachfront facility include a surface-stabilized path rated for mobility devices. We are bringing wheelchair users into the design review before the blueprint is final."
• "The parks department is budgeting beach access route maintenance as a recurring line item. It is not a donation program."
• "We are retrofitting three beach locations this fiscal year to install permanent access routes. The cost estimate is $45,000 total across all three sites."

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect involves public agencies treating beach accessibility as optional, deferred, or another entity's responsibility:

• "The beach surface is natural. We can't be expected to pave it."
• "We have an ADA-compliant parking lot and accessible restrooms. That satisfies our obligation."
• "If we get a grant or someone donates a mat, we'll put one out. It's not in the budget this year."
• "Nobody has filed a complaint, so we assume the current setup is fine."
• "Beach wheelchairs are available for loan at the lifeguard station. That covers our program accessibility requirement."

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes the labor wheelchair users undertake when public beaches provide no permanent access route:

• "I have to research every beach before I go to find out if it has a mat, where the mat stops, and whether my chair can handle the gap between the mat's edge and the water. That research takes hours."
• "I carry the panels myself so I don't have to rely on someone being at the beach who can help me. But carrying them means planning the whole trip around the logistics of the mat."
• "The mat at that beach stopped 50 feet from the water. I couldn't get any closer. So I watched from where the path ended."
• "I bring my own mats now because the ones at public beaches, when they have any, never go far enough. I have to build the last section myself."

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All observations occur within the context of public beach and outdoor recreation access in the United States, with reference to San Diego County, California, where Access Trax was founded and first deployed.

Footnotes

1. Skyler Rossi, "Changemakers: A California Occupational Therapist Has an Invention to Help People with Disabilities Reach the Sea," Times of Entrepreneurship, January 24, 2022. https://timesofe.com/changemakers-a-california-occupational-therapist-has-an-invention-to-help-people-with-disabilities-reach-the-sea/ ↩

2. Northeast ADA Center, "Beach Access," AskADA, https://northeastada.org/askada/beach-access; U.S. Access Board, "Chapter 10: Outdoor Developed Areas," ABA Accessibility Guide, https://www.access-board.gov/aba/guides/chapter-10-outdoor/ ↩ ↩²

3. Nina R. Dietz, "Accessibility Technology Ensures Everyone Gets a Day at the Beach," Sierra Club, April 28, 2024. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/environment-explained/accessibility-technology-ensures-everyone-gets-day-beach ↩

4. U.S. Access Board, Architectural Barriers Act Accessibility Standards for Outdoor Developed Areas, November 25, 2013. https://www.access-board.gov/aba/guides/chapter-10-outdoor/; U.S. Department of Justice, 2010 ADA Standards for Accessible Design, https://www.ada.gov/law-and-regs/design-standards/2010-stds/ ↩

5. Michael & Robin Lally Forward Foundation, "Accessible Beaches," https://lally.foundation/accessiblebeaches/ ↩ ↩²

6. Nina R. Dietz, "Accessibility Technology Ensures Everyone Gets a Day at the Beach," Sierra Club, April 28, 2024. https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/environment-explained/accessibility-technology-ensures-everyone-gets-day-beach ↩ ↩²

7. Katie Auchenbach, "The Extra Costs of Living with a Disability in the U.S. — Resetting the Policy Table," National Disability Institute, October 12, 2020. https://www.nationaldisabilityinstitute.org/reports/extra-costs-living-with-disability/ ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Michael & Robin Lally Forward Foundation, "Accessible Beaches," https://lally.foundation/accessiblebeaches/; City of Gulf Shores, Alabama, "Accessibility," https://www.gulfshoresal.gov/1268/Accessibility ↩

9. Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsch, "Crip Technoscience Manifesto," Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Vol. 5, No. 1, April 1, 2019. https://doi.org/10.28968/cftt.v5i1.29607 ↩

10. Marta Russell, Capitalism and Disability: Selected Writings by Marta Russell, ed. Keith Rosenthal (Haymarket Books, 2019). https://www.haymarketbooks.org/authors/821-marta-russell ↩

11. Gaochao Zhang, Dorthe V. Poulsen, Victoria L. Lygum, Sus S. Corazon, Marie C. Gramkow, and Ulrika K. Stigsdotter, "Health-Promoting Nature Access for People with Mobility Impairments: A Systematic Review," International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, Vol. 14, No. 7 (June 29, 2017), Article 703. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5551141/ ↩

12. Kathleen A. Martin Ginis et al., "Cardiovascular Health and Physical Activity in Adults with Chronic Spinal Cord Injury: A Systematic Review," Frontiers in Rehabilitation Sciences, 2022. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9671953/ ↩

13. Cory Lee, "Wheelchair Accessible San Diego, California," Curb Free with Cory Lee, December 12, 2022. https://curbfreewithcorylee.com/2022/12/12/wheelchair-accessible-san-diego-california/ ↩

14. City of Gulf Shores, Alabama, "Accessibility," https://www.gulfshoresal.gov/1268/Accessibility ↩