As Belinda Bradley says, “Google Maps is an essential app for navigation and travel”; unless you happen to be one of the 65 million people rolling around the globe on wheels – like her mom, Mary. Last month, Bradley started an online petition, asking Google to make Maps more reliable for people with disabilities.
125,000 signatures later, it appears the Big G is finally listening. In a new blog post, the internet giant has kicked off a campaign aimed at making the popular navigation app a whole lot friendlier to people with impaired mobility capacities.
Seeking to add to the list of disability-friendly features, the company is calling on its Local Guides community to join the effort and add more wheelchair accessibility attributes to Maps.
Google says that, assuming each of its tens of millions guides answers three questions every day, they’ll have over two billion answers to help people who depend on this information. In case you’re curious what these questions look like, here they are:
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Anyone interested in contributing to the effort can follow these steps:
- Make sure your Location History is turned on
- Head to Your Contributions in the upper-left menu
- Indicate whether the places you’ve visited are wheelchair-friendly
Should you encounter any troubles, you can refer to this guide [PDF]. Meanwhile, Android users even have the ability to seek out places that need that info.
Google is also hosting a series of Local Guides meetups around the globe to further encourage people to support this initiative. You can join one of these here.
In addition to all this, the Mountain View heavyweight has also rolled out a new series focusing on the difficulties people in wheelchairs run into daily as they navigate through their surroundings. You can catch the first two episodes of Rolling On below:
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