November 27 — Press conference “The Barrier-Free Map of Ukraine: how technology helps create accessible space”

More than 70,000 locations have appeared on the interactive Barrier-Free Map. These are the data of this year's accessibility monitoring in communities, which ran from June 1 to August 31. How the landscape of communities is changing against inclusion criteria can be seen in real time thanks to the company LUN, technology partner of Ukraine's Ministry of Development of Communities and Territories. The monitoring focused on two key components: assessing the accessibility of facilities in communities and plotting barrier-free routes on the digital map. Every checked location receives a mark: barrier-free; partly barrier-free; with barriers. For people who vitally need to know whether a given place or institution has barriers, such an interactive map is extremely important. It provides reliable and open access to the data at every stage of the work. At the same time, for security reasons, critical or vulnerable infrastructure identified by the communities is not shown on the map. Yevhen Komarov, deputy head of the Institute of Veterans, asked who may make changes to the barrier-free map and was told that only authorised persons can. Feedback and impressions about facilities already on the map, however, may be left by anyone. Such public oversight does not go unnoticed: feedback and reactions are taken into account in order to make Ukrainian spaces barrier-free and more comfortable.