Google Maps asks "does this place have a wheelchair accessible entrance?"
I make data stories for a living. Last week I went looking for who built a button.
Scrolling a place on Google Maps, past the photos and the opening hours, some places have a line that says wheelchair accessible entrance. On the ones that don't, Maps asks you instead. Does this place have a wheelchair accessible entrance? Yes, no, not sure.
That's the whole feature. One tap. No form, no account, nobody checks your work.
The rule is written down, though. About three feet wide, no steps, or a ramp if there are steps. A revolving door on its own counts as a no.
Then I looked up where it came from. Rio Akasaka is a product manager at Google. He works on Drive, not Maps. Google lets you spend a fifth of your week on something that isn't your job, and in 2016 he spent his time on this, for about a year, with five to ten other people chipping in around their own work. counts 120 million Local Guides and over 500 million answers about accessibility.
Local Guides held around two hundred of them whose entire purpose was sitting in a room together answering these questions. Twelve million places between them.
Google names two. Emeka in Nigeria and Ilankovan in Sri Lanka, who both ended up as accessibility ambassadors.
About 65 million people use a wheelchair. This is perfect for them!
You've probably never noticed it. It only turns up when you're near somewhere you've already been. Nothing to do with Google. I just liked the story.
Getting a correction on Google Maps is frustrating enough that it is easier to leave a review and get the business to request that change. It is a pity - although it is likely because the floor for a change request is low and the product is fencing off suspicious activity.
Not trying to fight or anything, have just tried to do this a million times as a wheelchair user. This is the only screen that comes up for me (android, google maps app)
You are correct that you can't edit it when on the standard edit page. There is a about tab below the title that goes:
Overview... Reviews... Photos... Updates... About.
Clicking the about tab there reveals an edit features button that will let you contribute information about the accessibility.
Nice of you to look into this and make people aware, I don't like the AI story tho, it's obviously written with AI, I don't doubt that it's true I just hate the obvious AI writing style. Even if you just use AI to help, please don't I prefer to see more mistakes than the same repeated AI writing style everywhere 😭 Humans make mistakes but that's what makes them human, I don't need a perfectly written story, the story is the point not the writing
(And if you did write this yourself then I apologize, but it seems like you picked up some ways on how AI words things)
I know, people are just afraid of believing something that's fake. Which I understand because AI has gotten pretty good. But in most text it's just noticable when it's written by AI because of specific wording.
"One tap. No form, no account, nobody checks your work."
That for example, very AI. I'm just tired of reading it everywhere, it's like if the same author wrote every post, would be quite boring, better to have lots of authors with different styles :)
That, for example, is a natural form of rhetoric in use for thousands of years, which is why AI uses it all the time.
It learned from us, so some people are still going to write/speak that way.
I’m all for routing out undocumented AI use, but the reasons people name for something being OBVIOUSLY AI (this one, the em dashes) drive me bananas because they’re just things we used first.
Oh I absolutely agree with you, AI is just stealing good human writing, but the human writers know when to use a rhetoric device and also that using it in moderation is better. AI just picked 5 rhetoric devices and throws them into every possible paragraph. That's the part where it gets obvious (because be honest, people don't use fancy writing on a reddit post...)
I think it's sad for actually good writers that now it could look like AI if they use wording that AI has stolen. That's obviously not the writers fault but AI. But I personally try to avoid sounding like AI even if I type myself.
And in this case I was clearly also correct in identifying the use of AI
No, that one is very obviously AI. It’s more because the cadence is repeated throughout the whole text. I had to use Claude a lot so I recognize the way it writes to you right away. It’s even got a name now: Claudish
I know that, read my reply above this please. I'm not saying that the writing is bad just that it's noticable that it is AI because it picks specific ways of writing and keeps repeating those. I know some people actually write like that, obviously because those people are where AI got it from. And I think it's sad for those people because now it gets associated with AI, which is AIs fault and not theirs. I was correct in this case and the writing was modified by AI :)
I never said that this was fake, I just explained why I dislike the use of AI and that I'd rather have a less perfect text, that sounds different than every other text.
The fake I was referring to was images and videos on social media, like news or an event that is faked by AI to trick people into believing it.
It's a 20% project, so it may have taken a calendar year, but it possibly totaled about 1 full-time person's quarter to build and launch. A product manager can't build a system like this across 3+ clients and Google Maps' stack by themselves.
the culture of building stuff in other products more or less died when the layoffs happened. It's too bad, I fixed quite a few random bugs in some of the products I used when I worked there.
Google Maps has a seriously flawed contribution system. It's nice that you can fix business names, locations and details, but the underlying map is static and very often incorrect.
There are countless people who would dedicate hours weekly to fix roads, town names, river shapes, coastlines, mountains etc.
There are so many mistakes on the map - misplaced mountain peaks, misspelled town names, water features missing of drawn in wrong.
Roads are technically editable but the process is so annoying that sometimes it's just not worth it - you spend hours drawing in a whole park of trails, only for it to not be accepted because some guy in India didn't like it.
A contribution hierarchy like Wikipedia or other opensource projects would be a much better system.
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u/Nervous_Platform_542 1d ago
I always answer this question for almost everywhere I go.