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Since the launch of the site and creation of the nonprofit Access Information Inc., which he started with longtime friend Greg Snider, 39, of Germantown, they’ve printed a guidebook for the Washington, D.C., area and now offer a new guidebook for New York City tourists. They are planning a Las Vegas guidebook next year.

The free guidebook for the metropolitan area is distributed in hotels and museums and by the Washington, D.C. Chamber of Commerce, the Washington Convention and Tourism Corp. and the National Rehabilitation Hospital.

Access Information annually updates the 40-page guidebook and prints 10,000 copies, up significantly from the 1,000 first printed in 2001.

‘‘It’s expanded so dramatically,” Snider said Friday. ‘‘It’s astronomical.”

When Snider and Holt started the Web site in 2000, they focused exclusively on reviewing restaurants based on their accessibility, including parking, bathrooms, entrance and overall space.

‘‘We had something that no one else had,” Holt said Friday over a crab cake sandwich at Blue Fin in Gaithersburg. ‘‘There were no guides specifically for those with a disability.”

The idea for the Disability Guide formed in early 2000 when Holt was meeting friends at a District club that claimed to be wheelchair accessible. When Holt arrived at the downtown dance spot, which has since closed, he was wheeled around back, past garbage cans and through a door that put Holt on the dance floor.

Holt, who was in a car accident in 1986 that left him partially paralyzed, went home that night and scoured the Internet for local resources that would have helped him avoid that situation.

He couldn’t find any.

‘‘He was saying, ‘I wish there was something that gave me the real-world information,’” said Snider, who met Holt 30 years ago while they were students at Robert Frost Middle School in Rockville. They both grew up in Potomac and graduated from Thomas S. Wootton High School in 1986.

The Web site was an instant success, they said, so much so, that they expanded to a printed guide in 2001 with the support of the Washington Convention and Tourism Corp. after Holt met with representatives there to discuss the idea.

‘‘I did not expect them, on the spot, to say, ‘We’re going to sponsor you,’” Holt said. The tourism bureau donates money to the Access Information Inc., which also is funded by advertising and a yearly silent auction and poker tournament, planned this year on April 15 in Annapolis. The guides are sold for $5 on DisabilityGuide.org.

‘‘The restaurant reviews were really the start of our responsibility to tourists,” Holt said.

By 2002, they doubled the printing; in 2003, it jumped to 5,000.

Then, in 2005 Holt was involved with helping thousands of veterans attend the dedication of the World War II Memorial on the National Mall. They printed 10,000 guides for the first time that year.

The guidebook now includes more than just restaurants. Services such as wheelchair rental and repairs, reviews of tourist attractions, shopping centers and entertainment venues are included.

The ‘‘best of the best” accessible restaurants inside the Washington Beltway are printed in the guide, while reviews of other restaurants –– those that Holt deemed not as accessible — are on the Web site.

Holt visits the venues to write reviews for people with all kinds of disabilities. For the New York guide, however, they partnered with the Mount Sinai Chapter of the National Spinal Cord Injury Association to hire a reviewer to visit sites.

‘‘There’s no way, obviously, for us to force anyone to change things,” Snider said. However, restaurants have contacted them to inform them of an improvement in accessibility.

‘‘Rusty wrote that he couldn’t get to the bathroom in this one restaurant,” Snider recalled. An employee later contacted Snider and Holt to let them know the supplies that hindered access to the bathroom were moved.

Access Information Inc. makes a difference in other ways as well.

Disability guidebook producers in Tempe, Ariz., and Niagara Falls, N.Y., have contacted Holt and Snider for advice.

‘‘It’s a responsibility that we’re proud to have,” Holt said. ‘‘We think this is the best place to live in. To represent this area is an honor and something we don’t really want to quit doing.”

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To learn more about Access Information Inc. or its annual poker tournament, visit www.DisabilityGuide.org.