#MapMyDay, a campaign to raise awareness of the problems steps cause every day for those who use wheelchairs, recently made its official kickoff December 3.

Via the campaign, the Berlin, Germany-based nonprofit association NGO Sozialhelden and the World Health Organization (WHO) call on people to rate places in their neighborhoods according to their wheelchair accessibility using the interactive city map Wheelmap.org.

The occasion for this worldwide event is the International Day of Persons with Disabilities, according to a media release from NGO Sozialhelden.

Steps, stairs, and broken elevators are daily barriers for people with wheelchairs. On the wheelmap.org map, developed by NGO Sozialhelden, people can see whether a public place is accessible by wheelchair or not. In the past 5 years, people around the world have marked more than 600,000 places on the map, and more than 500 are added every day, per the release.

Raúl Krauthausen, founder of NGO Sozialhelden and creator of Wheelmap.org, explains in the release that the #MapMyDay campaign’s goal is to “motivate people around the world to become part of the movement and to advocate for accessibility.”

“If every single person who takes part on December 3 and the days thereafter just stops for a moment to think about whether his or her favorite café or the baker on the corner are wheelchair accessible, then we shall already have gained a great deal,” he adds.

The #MapMyDay hashtag is where participants can share their experiences on social media.

“We are very interested in hearing what kinds of things mappers experience during the day, because many people without a wheelchair are often not even aware of barriers.  That is why, for example, we have heard from people on Twitter that the wheelchair-accessible restroom of a place is in the basement. We will also collect these oddities and report on them with the hashtag,” says “MapMyDay” campaign manager Svenja Heinecke, in the release.

How long the campaign continues depends on participant interest.

“We hope that many newly marked places will be added to the 600,000 we already have, and then we will decide when ‘MapMyDay’ is over,” Heinecke states in the release.

For more information, visit NGO Sozialhelden.

[Source: NGO Sozialhelden]