AccessVisDC: Interactive Visual Exploration of Physical Accessibility

Abstract

For people with mobility impairments, street infrastructure such as sidewalks play a crucial role in navigating within cities. However, there is a severe lack of readily available tools for querying accessibility information. In this project, we will work on building a tool that will visualize physical accessibility of Washington DC. The interactive prototype, AccessVisDC, will highlight (in)accessible areas of DC via creative use of geo-visualization techniques such as heat maps, street-level visualization and others, for a dataset of geo-tagged accessibility labels. This dataset is from Project Sidewalk, an online tool that crowdsources labels for accessibility features and problems within Google Street View (GSV). This dataset has >250,000 labels on accessibility of sidewalks in Washington DC. Each label denotes a specific accessibility attribute in the physical world such as Curb Ramp, Surface Problem, Obstacle in Path, Missing Curb Ramp, its lat/lng position and associated metadata (severity rating, text description, and underlying GSV image). The data (label types with their positions) is available via Project Sidewalk's GeoJSON API. The stakeholders of such a tool would be city residents (esp. people with mobility impairments), city governments, and researchers & data enthusiasts. Each stakeholder has their own requirements from such an interface. We start with the focus on one task that answers the question: "What is the accessibility of a specific region and what are the factors influencing the accessibility of this region?"