Nick Schoenhoff chose to come to McMaster because he wanted to study at a university with an accessible campus and a high-quality science faculty.

The 22-year-old Oakville native broke his neck in a snowboarding accident at age 13, and uses a wheelchair.

He liked the McMaster campus because it’s mainly flat and compact, and was already fairly well adapted to accommodate students with mobility issues.

Still, his experience in getting around told him that some routes were better than others. By trial and error, he learned the best ways to get from place to place, and realized that sometimes the shortest route was not always the easiest.

“Whenever I’d go to a new building on campus, I’d have to learn the best way,” he says. “Something that might not look like a barrier to an able-bodied person can look different to someone in a wheelchair.”

Schoenhoff, a level IV life sciences student, wanted to use his knowledge to help other people who are learning to navigate the campus.

His quest for accessibility and his proficiency in science came together in a project that has placed among the province’s best in a competition to improve accessibility at Ontario universities.

Schoenhoff’s Campus Accessibility Mapping Project, or CAMP, rates the pedestrian pathways of McMaster using a green-yellow-red code, based on their condition, steepness and other factors.

Red-rated paths include direct barriers such as walls, curbs, stairs or grass. Yellow-rated pathways are passable but feature challenges such as cross-slopes, while green paths are smooth and easily traveled.

CAMP started as a class project with Kathleen Martin Ginis in kinesiology, and grew from there.

The competition, created by the Council of Ontario Universities, is called Innovative Designs for Accessibility, or IdeA, and is open to undergraduate students in all areas of study. Schoenhoff was judged a runner-up from a field that included entries from 20 universities.

The recognition and media coverage has been encouraging, he says.

“The response has really told me this is a good thing.”

Schoenhoff’s project is still growing in scope and depth. With support and encouragement from McMaster’s Student Accessibility Services, he is now working to create an electronic version with the capacity to add live updates for intermittent barriers such as snow. He hopes to create similar systems for other universities.