Project Sidewalk

Project Description

Roughly 30.6 million individuals in the US have physical disabilities that affect their ambulatory activities; nearly half of those individuals report using an assistive aid such as a wheelchair, cane, crutches, or walker. Despite comprehensive civil rights legislation for Americans with disabilities, many city streets, sidewalks, and businesses remain inaccessible. The problem is not just that street-level accessibility affects where and how people travel in cities but also that there are few, if any, mechanisms to determine accessible areas of a city a priori.

This project describes a two-pronged vision: first, to develop scalable data collection methods for acquiring sidewalk accessibility information using a combination of crowdsourcing, computer vision, and online map imagery, and second, to use this new data to design, develop, and evaluate a novel set of navigation and map tools for accessibility. Our overarching goal is to transform the ways in which accessibility information is collected and visualized for every sidewalk, street, and building façade in America.

Publications

Interactively Modeling and Visualizing Neighborhood Accessibility at Scale: An Initial Study of Washington DC

Anthony Li, Manaswi Saha, Anupam Gupta, Jon E. Froehlich

keywords: urban informatics, information visualization, urban data mining, urban accessibility, geo-visualization, walkability index

PDF | doi | Citation | Project Sidewalk

A Feasibility Study of Using Google Street View and Computer Vision to Track the Evolution of Urban Accessibility

Ladan Najafizadeh, Jon E. Froehlich

Extended Abstract Proceedings of ASSETS 2018

keywords: computer vision, google street view, urban informatics, urban data mining, urban accessibility

PDF | Citation | Project Sidewalk

A Pilot Deployment of an Online Tool for Large-Scale Virtual Auditing of Urban Accessibility

Manaswi Saha, Kotaro Hara, Soheil Behnezhad, Anthony Li, Mikey Saugstad, Teja Maddali, Sage Chen, Jon E. Froehlich

keywords: mobility impairments, gis, crowdsourcing, urban accessibility

PDF | doi | Citation | Project Sidewalk

The Design of Assistive Location-based Technologies for People with Ambulatory Disabilities: A Formative Study

Kotaro Hara, Christine Chan, Jon E. Froehlich

keywords: accessibility, mobility impairments, formative study, gis, navigation, trip planning

PDF | Citation | Project Sidewalk

Characterizing and Visualizing Physical World Accessibility at Scale Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning

Kotaro Hara, Jon E. Froehlich

keywords: crowdsourcing accessibility, computer vision, google street view, amazon mechanical turk, personalized routing, accessibility map visualizations

PDF | Citation | Project Sidewalk

Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View: An Extended Analysis

Kotaro Hara, Shiri Azenkot, Megan Campbell, Cynthia Bennett, Vicki Le, Sean Pannella, Robert Moore, Kelly Minckler, Rochelle Ng, Jon E. Froehlich

keywords: accessibility, crowdsourcing accessibility, google street view, low-vision, public transport, bus stop auditing, crowdsourcing, blind users, accessible bus stops, remote data collection

PDF | Citation | Project Sidewalk

Tohme: Detecting Curb Ramps in Google Street View Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning

Kotaro Hara, Jin Sun, Robert Moore, David Jacobs, Jon E. Froehlich

keywords: crowdsourcing accessibility, computer vision, google street view, amazon mechanical turk

PDF | Citation | Project Sidewalk

An Initial Study of Automatic Curb Ramp Detection with Crowdsourced Verification using Google Street View Images

Kotaro Hara, Jin Sun, Noa Chazan, David Jacobs, Jon E. Froehlich

keywords: computer vision, accessible urban navigation, mechanical turk, data collection, accessible cities, physical accessibility, crowdsourcing, google streetview, crowd verification

PDF | Citation | Project Sidewalk

Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View

Kotaro Hara, Shiri Azenkot, Megan Campbell, Cynthia Bennett, Vicki Le, Sean Pannella, Robert Moore, Kelly Minckler, Rochelle Ng, Jon E. Froehlich

| Best Paper Award

keywords: crowdsourcing accessibility, google street view, accessible public transit, blind, low-vision, accessible urban navigation, mechanical turk, data collection, accessible cities

PDF | Citation | Project Sidewalk

Exploring Early Solutions for Automatically Identifying Inaccessible Sidewalks in the Physical World using Google Street View

Kotaro Hara, Victoria Le, Jin Sun, David Jacobs, Jon E. Froehlich

keywords: computer vision, google street view, machine learning, crowdsourcing, physical world accessibility, street-level accessibility

PDF | Citation | Project Sidewalk

Combining Crowdsourcing and Google Street View to Identify Street-level Accessibility Problems

Kotaro Hara, Victoria Le, Jon E. Froehlich

keywords: crowdsourcing accessibility, google street view, accessible urban navigation, mechanical turk, data collection, accessible cities, physical accessibility, wheelchair, urban informatics

PDF | Citation | Project Sidewalk