LOOK: Help make the world more wheelchair-friendly with Google Maps

Image: INQUIRER.net stock photo

Google Maps is making sure navigation is easier for everyone, especially for those who are wheelchair-bound.

While the tech company added the “Accessibility” feature to identify wheelchair-friendly locations last December 2016, this July, it decided to crowdsource accessibility information through “Your contributions.”

The feature is available in Google Maps for Android. From the Google Maps menu, tap “Your contributions” on the left side.

The option opens to a window where you can select “Uncover missing info”. 

Image: Screen grab via Google Maps

This leads to categories of places and their features, the first of which is “Accessibility”.

Image: Screen grab via Google Maps

From here, you can click on any of the locations marked by orange crosses and tick off whether they are wheelchair-friendly or not.

Image: Screen grab via Google Maps

To check if a place is wheelchair-friendly, one can tap the two-line description of the place to view information on its features, such as amenities and accessibility.

Image: Screen grab via Google Maps

Image: Screen grab via Google Maps

While this doesn’t seem to be applicable to every place in the Philippines just yet, contributing information can help increase accessibility among persons with disability (PWDs) and others who require wheelchairs for mobility.

According to Google, almost 7 million places around the world already have accessibility information. JB

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