A MAP WITHOUT STEPS
Is there a step at the door of the new café? Is the toilet big enough for a wheelchair? Many wheelchair users find out by checking StepFree, a free online map, before they leave home. Volunteers around the world add information, and each café, shop or museum on the map gets a color: green if it is fully accessible1, orange if it is partly accessible, and red if it is not. The map now includes over two million places in about ninety countries.(lines 1–5)
StepFree was created by Daniel Moreno, who grew up in a small village in southern Spain. At nine, he was hurt in a car accident and could no longer walk. There was no special school nearby, so Daniel stayed at the village school, where friends carried his wheelchair upstairs. He did well in his studies, and at eighteen he was accepted to a university in Madrid. There, a professor offered him a job in her computer lab, and in his final year the university paid for him to spend a year studying in Canada. Daniel knows how lucky he was. In his village, most young people in wheelchairs never had such great opportunities. "I wanted to help them," he says, "so that they could go to school, find work and meet friends, just like everyone else."(lines 6–13)
Daniel built the first version of StepFree in 2016, while he was still a student. At first, the map showed only forty places in Madrid, and he had visited every one of them himself. Then other wheelchair users joined him, and the map grew quickly. Today, anyone can add a place and rate2 it by answering a few simple questions: Is there a step at the door? Is the door wide enough? Is there a toilet for wheelchair users? Because many people answer the same questions about each place, mistakes are usually corrected within days.(lines 14–19)
In 2021, StepFree won an international prize for technology that improves people's lives. Daniel used the prize money to hire two full-time programmers, and he opened small offices in Mexico and India, where volunteers learn to map their own neighborhoods. Some city councils now use the map, too. When it shows that most shops on a street are red, the council knows where to build ramps3 first. "My dream is a world where nobody needs StepFree," says Daniel, "because every place on the map will be green. Until then, we will keep mapping."(lines 20–25)