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Improvement in environmental accessibility via volunteered geographic information: a case study

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Abstract

Although geo-crowdsourcing approaches provide an opportunity to collect and share environmental accessibility information for people with disabilities, it is not clear whether individuals from different user groups have similar or different behavior while contributing volunteered geographic information about environmental accessibility. In this paper, we present a case study to investigate how users (including elderly people, wheelchair users, blind and visually impaired people as well as volunteers) annotate environmental accessibility information in their journey. We found that subjects from different user groups had different behavior while annotating accessibility information and volunteers who do not have a disability are not good at spotting environmental accessibility issues. With these findings, we conclude a series of insights about how to collect collaborative environmental accessibility for designers and developers.

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Notes

  1. http://wheelmap.org/.

  2. http://www.accesstogether.org/.

  3. http://www.clickandgomaps.com/.

  4. http://www.openstreetmap.org/.

  5. BlindSquare, www.blindsquare.com.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all participants for this study, as well as Dr. Völkel.

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    Authors and Affiliations

    1. Human-Computer Interaction Group, Computer Science, Technische Universitat Dresden, 01187, Dresden, Germany

      Limin Zeng & Gerhard Weber

    2. Software Engineering of Ubiquitous Systems Group, Computer Science, Technische Universitat Dresden, 01187, Dresden, Germany

      Romina Kühn

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    1. Limin Zeng
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    2. Romina Kühn
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    3. Gerhard Weber
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    Correspondence to Limin Zeng.

    Additional information

    Limin Zeng and Romina Kühn have contributed equally to this work.

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    Zeng, L., Kühn, R. & Weber, G. Improvement in environmental accessibility via volunteered geographic information: a case study. Univ Access Inf Soc 16, 939–949 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10209-016-0505-9

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