Buckeyes4Accessibility members conduct an accessibility audit on Ohio State’s campus. Credit: Courtesy of Buckeyes4Accessibility
Some students with disabilities have to rely on mobility aids to navigate Ohio State’s large campus.
The Ohio State app includes a campus map that indicates where the American with Disabilities Act, also known as ADA, compliant doors and accessible ramps are. However, the map doesn’t specify possible nearby obstacles and campus terrain, which could make it difficult for wheelchair users.
Some members of Buckeyes for Accessibility, also referred to as B4A, personally experience these challenges. The organization decided to create The Access Map to provide a more comprehensive resource for what is accessible on campus.
“I kept finding myself, whenever I needed to get places on campus, having to look up the building emergency access plans to be able to figure out what door to use,” said Kayden Gill, creator of the map and a graduate student in the College of Health and Rehabilitative Sciences.
The map designates where ADA entrances are, the difficulty of certain pathways and where hills are located on campus.
“It’s mostly a resource to support disabled students on campus, mostly physically disabled students, navigate between classes because there isn’t another resource like that for the outdoor areas of the Columbus campus,” said Code Beschler, the current president of B4A and graduate student in comparative studies.
The idea of The Access Map, which began in 2020, was inspired by a class project Gill presented to members of B4A during a club meeting. Once everyone was on board, they started personally identifying which areas of campus were accessible.
“Every team had a wheelchair user or someone with wheelchair use experience,” Beschler said. “Then there was a notetaker and a photographer.”
Gala Korniyenko, an Ohio State lecturer specializing in disability research and has a Ph.D. in city and regional planning, assisted with the audits.
“The idea was like, we go in the actual place, take photos,” Korniyenko said. “Like cracks on the sidewalk or closed doors or where entrances are looking at obstacles.”?
Even though the map was primarily designed for wheelchair users, each source said these groups would track and report other accessibility issues they ran into.
“If we noticed a tree was too low and someone who’s legally blind might whack into it because their [white-tipped vision] cane doesn’t detect it,” Gill said.“We submit[ed] reports to get it trimmed.”
After gathering this data, it was added to a campus map, complete with a color gradient to indicate the difficulty of various pathways, Gill and Beschler said.
“If you lined up a bunch of manual wheelchair users, everyone is going to have different abilities to propel themselves up different steeps and slopes,” Gill said. “So we wanted to make it a gradient, that way people could choose their own access plan and path and meet their needs.”
There was talk of collaborating with the university to make this an official project, Gill and Beschler said.
“Trying to get the university to endorse [The Access Map] was difficult, and it didn’t actually come to fruition in the way we had hoped,” said Beschler.
Scott Lissner, an Ohio State ADA coordinator, confirmed that he worked with the group. He said in an email that because the map’s data is collected by individual users, it limits what Ohio State’s map can use to be ADA compliant.
“The ADA does not require us to call out these features on maps, instead it requires us to provide signage on, and in, buildings directing users to accessible entrances and restrooms,” Lissner said.
Korniyenko said Ohio State should consider this map to ensure every student is included.
“I think OSU should embrace it,” said Korniyenko. “It’s like, students who have disabilities do [campus accessibility auditing] on their free time on Saturday instead of having fun or doing something else.”
Beschler said he hopes to expand and update The Access Map and is open to any student who wants to help him do so. He said that updates on upcoming campus accessibility auditing will be available on B4A’s Instagram page.
“We’d like to go back in and hopefully edit the current map because the last information we have is from 2023,” he said.
Beschler wants more students to understand what this map means.
?“I would like to get students, potentially non-disabled students, to also know what these audits mean,” Beschler said. “What does it mean for a building to be accessible or inaccessible?”
The article was updated on Jan. 28 at 1:50 p.m. to add Gala Korniyenko’s Ph.D. degree.
