Newsletter
Google Maps is now letting you add accessibility details to places in an attempt to make Maps, and the areas that people are using Maps to navigate, more of a useful tool for those who may have accessibility issues. Now under the new accessibility category tag within Maps when you’re describing a place, there will be options for whether or not locations are wheelchair accessible, have wheelchair accessible entrances, elevators, bathrooms, parking lots, and seating. With these new markers it’ll be much easier for people in wheelchairs to figure out ahead of time if a certain location will be able to accommodate people with wheelchairs in this fashion.
Users will be able to see if specific places have these wheelchair accessible features from the dedicated page in Maps for that location, but if you haven’t yet settled on a choice and you decide to search for a place to eat and have drinks for instance, which would bring up numerous results and not just one, you can also tap on the accessibility tag to highlight it and filter the list of results down to places that only have wheelchair accessible features instead of trying to find out about each place individually. This method should be much more useful when you don’t have a place in mind yet to go to.
While Google has likely been able to add in some information on its own in regards to this new category, much of what’s been filled in has been done by Local Guides – legions of Google Maps users who share their experiences about places they’ve visited in and around their local cities as well as places they’ve been outside of them. Thanks in huge part to Local Guides Google states that it has already been able to list nearly 7 million places as having some or all of these new wheelchair accessible features, and that number only stands to grow now that Google has publicly mentioned the new accessibility focused change to Maps. The new accessibility features are just the latest effort from Google to make Maps more of a useful tool for everyone, and if you’re interested in checking out how Local Guides are making use of the new tool, the video below does a good job of highlighting this new capability for users.
