The thing that most of us able-bodied people take for granted is accessibility. If we want to get to somewhere and we have to end up parking far away, or if the area has many steps to climb, we don’t think too much about it. Unfortunately for those who are wheelchair bound, this pretty much means that those locations are too troublesome to go to.
Now there are apps and websites that do tell users if a particular location is wheelchair accessible, but this is now a responsibility that Google wants to take upon themselves, according to a report from Business Insider. Google Drive product manager Rio Akasaka has decided in his spare time to update Google Maps to mention when wheelchair accessibility is available.
This is based on information submitted by Local Guides where there is enough information for Google to now display wheelchair accessibility as an amenity of a location’s page. However understandably for now the feature is only live in the US, but presumably this will be rolled out on a larger scale to other countries around the world in time.
As Akasaka notes, this is not just for those who are wheelchair bound. It could be for people who might be on crutches, canes, people who have difficulty climbing stairs, or even for families with prams that need to be pushed.
Filed in . Read more about Apps, Google and Google Maps.