Anthony Deaver

Did you know that a place that’s labeled as ‘Handicapped Accessible’ it might not be accessible by everyone?

Knowing if a place is handicapped accessible is a good thing.  Knowing how that place is accessible is even better.  That’s what Accessible Places aims to solve.  By allowing people to tag a location with accessible attributes it helps to inform others how easy or hard a place might be to get into.

For example it might have an elevator but no easy curb access.  So once you’re in the building you can go anywhere but getting into the building itself is difficult.

The project was conceived and built within 48 hours at the Boston hack day back at the end of February.  It was inspired by my wife who is occasionally in a wheelchair and who wanted me to do something at the hack around accessibility.

The idea was born out of need.  The need for people who are in some way physically challenged to find out exactly how accessible some places actually are without actually having to physically visit the location to find out.

Accessible Places sheds light on communities, easily showing how accessible locations are. Our goal is to allow any user to plan their daily life by mapping out how to navigate a physical space that wasn’t designed with them in mind. By contributing to the project everyone’s experiences and observations will help inform others while increasing awareness of accessibility problems.

By using percentages next to accessibility details for each location we can show how frequently users select or agree with that option for this location, a ‘confidence index’ for each attribute.  The higher the number, the greater confidence that particular attribute (for example, powered doors) is actually there.  It’s basically a self-correcting system.

The ‘Hack” consisted of three main events.  The idea/team creation, the build and the presentation.  It turned out we only had 5 minutes to present the project before a panel of judges, so we decided to split it into 2 parts, ‘Why’ and ‘How/Demo’.  Since I originated the idea I got the why side of things.  I had 2.5 minutes to talk about why we were doing this.  The problem wasn’t going to be ‘what was I going to say’, but ‘what was I not going to say’.  I easily could have talked about it for 30 minutes.

This is the ‘why’ part of the presentation we gave at the Boston Hack Day:

People with physical disabilities do not have the same access to locations the rest of us do.  In most cases they don’t even have information they can call on to find places they do can access.

My wife is a perfect example of this.  She has a birth defect and is in a wheelchair part of the time.  When we go out to dinner or a movie, or even just to the mall I often find that I have trouble trying to get the door open and the chair angled through and in.  If she were by herself on these occasions, she simply wouldn’t be able to go on.

This problem isn’t unique.  We are not alone.  In the United States alone there are 32 million people over the age of 18, 5 million under the age of 18 and 2.9 million vets who are categorized as ‘disabled’.  On top of that is the 79 million ‘baby boomers’ that are coming of age over the next few years, many of which will need physical assistance of some kind.

To solve this we created the ‘Accessible Places’ project.  It is a mobile and desktop based site that allows people to search for and view the accessible attributes of a specific location.  Sites are commented on and tagged with attributes by the people that use and experience them every day.  So this is a tool that is built for, and powered by the people who need it.

Sam gave the demo and talked about the tech we used and how easy it was to navigate and search.  It seems incredibly simple on the face until you realize that all this data is captured and is going to be shared.

It was stressful trying to compact 48 hours worth of story and effort into 5 minutes, but we somehow managed.  Of course there is always an ‘unseen’.  In my case it was the mic.  No matter where I went there was feedback. So much so I have to edit down my part of the presentation to ensure Sam got his 2.5 minutes.

In spite of all that, and the fact that I non of us had more than 40 minutes sleep in the last 36 hours of the event, we won!

We ended up winning the ‘Best use of Geo-Location’ category!

The project isn’t over!  Right now we are trying to get a better dataset for our location search.  To do that we are attempting to get into the Google Places API beta.  If anyone can help, let me know!

Below is what will eventually become the about page for accessibleplaces.in.

How To Use Search for a place. We’ll let you know how accessible other people found the place. File your own report based on your findings. AccessiblePlaces.in (link) is a crowd-sourcing platform that allows people with disability to search for and report on the accessibility of places in and around Boston (and beyond). Users can search and report from their computer or their mobile device. The application is useful for people who have impaired mobility, vision, or hearing and would like to know if a place can accommodate them, before they make the trip all the way there. Use Case Susan wants to try out the new restaurant in downtown Boston that all her friends are raving about. The only problem is that when she gets there she finds out that the place is not accessible to someone in a wheelchair. Someone like her.Susan then goes to AccessiblePlaces.in and files a report based on her experience. Because of Susan, others will not have the same experience that she has; and attention will be drawn to the lack of accessibility at that restaurant. Technology The site is built using the Slim PHP micro-framework with jQuery Mobile for the interface. On the backend, PHP and CouchDB are used. It is built from the ground up to have an easy to use RESTful API and stores data that is compatible with the Open Civic Data standard.  It is fully ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Application) compliant so it’s usable via screen-readers and works even if you have javascript and CSS disabled. Best of all, the entire project is open source. Members Anthony Deaver ( @AnthonyDeaver ) Sam Bisbee ( @sbisbee ) Andrew Curioso ( @AndrewCurioso )