About

I’m Chouaieb Nemri. I navigate the world as a wheelchair user, living with a rare form of muscular dystrophy, and I fly anyway.

Every trip starts the same way. Somewhere between booking and boarding, I have to find out whether this particular airline will accept this particular chair with this particular battery — and the answer is never in one place. It is split across an accessibility page, a dangerous-goods page and a baggage page that contradict each other. It is in a language I may not read. It is behind a bot wall, or a JavaScript shell, or a PDF from 2019 that nobody has updated. And when I cannot find it, I do what everyone else does: I ask in a forum and get an answer that is confident, well-meaning and out of date.

That is an absurd way to run a system that decides whether disabled people can travel. So I gathered it. Airline by airline, from their own words, with a link and a date on every single figure.

Why the details matter more than they look

A power chair is not luggage. It is a custom-fitted medical device that costs as much as a car, is built around one person’s body, and takes months to replace. When it is damaged in a hold, the trip ends and the independence goes with it — you are not waiting for a suitcase, you are waiting to be able to leave a room on your own again.

And the thing that decides all of this is usually one number nobody told you. A cargo-hold door that is 81 cm rather than 119 cm. A watt-hour rating printed on a label you never thought to photograph. A notice period of 72 hours where you assumed 48. None of these are hard to find out. They are just hard to find.

So the discipline here is deliberately strict: a fact is either traced to the airline’s own page, or it is blank. No inference, no industry-standard defaults, no confident guess. If an airline does not publish its watt-hour limit, this site says exactly that and hands you the phone number, because a plausible wrong number is far more dangerous than an honest gap. I would rather this tell you it does not know than strand you.

The rest of my work

By day I’m a Generative AI Blackbelt at Google Cloud, in Toulouse, where I architect enterprise AI strategy and help organisations design and scale GenAI systems. Before that I was a Solutions Architect at AWS, and before that I worked across data, cloud and machine learning at DataScientest, Devoteam and Capgemini. I studied Electrical & Computer Engineering at Georgia Tech and engineering at INP Toulouse (ENSEEIHT).

At the AWS Summit Paris 2023 I presented an AI tool built to assist people with visual impairments, and I mentor engineers — particularly disabled engineers — pursuing careers in tech. Accessibility is not a side interest bolted onto that work. Designing for failure, planning for friction, and treating accessibility as a first-class requirement is simply how I build anything, because it is how I have to live.

wheelair is the version of that applied to a problem I have personally been stuck on, in an airport, more than once.

This site, specifically

It would be absurd to publish a wheelchair reference that a disabled person could not use. So: every page works with JavaScript turned off, with a keyboard alone, and with a screen reader. Contrast clears WCAG 2.2 AA in both light and dark themes, checked automatically on every build rather than promised. Touch targets are large. Motion respects your system setting. Airline pages and the chair card are laid out to print cleanly on paper, with the source links written out in full, because paper still works at a check-in desk when your phone is at 3%.

There are no cookies, no trackers, no accounts and no analytics. Anything you type into the fit checker or the chair card stays in your browser.

The whole dataset is free to download and reuse: airlines.json, index.json, coverage.json. Keep the source links and the dates if you build on it — without them the data is worthless.

Found something wrong?

Errors here are inevitable, because airlines rewrite these pages constantly and never announce it. What matters is fixing them quickly. Here is how to report one — it takes about a minute and you do not need to be technical.