The accessibility data was crowd-sourced from people who are regular Google Maps users that respond to questions such as cost, operating hours, addresses about places they have visited.
This feature was delivered as a side project by a team of Google’s employees who used the famous policy of Google: Employees can spend 20% of their time working on other projects unrelated to their main jobs. Popular services such as Gmail, AdSense, and Google News all started as 20% projects.
This feature is useful not only for wheelchair users but also for people such as parents with prams who need easy access to a building.