Evaluation of accessible design of public transport facilities

Today, accessibility for transport is an important issue to maintain the sustainability of our society. Laws and regulations order all new transport facilities be accessible, and transport companies are now trying to introduce accessibility into existing facilities. The experience so far teaches us that it is easy to realise an accessible facility when the facility is newly constructed, but it is strenuous and expensive to introduce accessibility into existing facilities, especially large public transport facilities such as underground stations. Under such a difficult situation, a detailed evaluation tool for accessible designs may be of use to the planning/design of the introduction of accessibility. This research intends to develop a new evaluation tool for accessibility. This research assumes that the accessible design in public transport facilities is of benefit not only to elderly or disabled people but also to all people with the diversity. The significance of the proposed model is to focus on benefits of the accessible design to a variety of people including not only elderly and disabled people but also other people. Accessibility in public transport has previously been regarded as an additional service designed specially for those who cannot manage ordinary facilities. This research suggests a new viewpoint that accessibility is not something only for limited people, but for all people. (i.e. Robust people can also easily use low floor buses.) Another significance of this research is to propose a practical evaluation tool based on the proposed model. Moreover, combining research on accessibility for transport with physiological/ occupational research should be recognised as a unique approach

Accessibility of websites of the European national tourism boards

Purpose: The aim is to find out the current state of accessibility of the websites of European national tourism boards. Furthermore, the identification of the most common errors in terms of accessibility as well as recommendations leading to their correction is aimed for. Design/methodology/approach: The study is based on methods of testing the availability of web systems. The testing included automated tools, namely AChecker and Accessibility Evaluation Tool, as well as the WCAG 2.1 checklist developed by WebAIM initiative. Findings: The research has shown a relatively high accessibility of those websites. Nevertheless, some accessibility violations have been identified that can significantly complicate the accessibility of those websites for users using various assistive devices or other alternative hardware or software means. The most commonly identified errors include: failure to use alternative text for content-relevant images, the absence of text or audio transcripts for videos shared via Youtube, missing descriptions for text form elements and missing label for search form. Practical implications: The results of the research can be used in the evaluation of web presentations at the level of tourism boards and destination management. Originality/Value: The main output of this article is the application of web testing methodology on a comprehensive set of national tourist boards.peer-reviewe

Human Arm simulation for interactive constrained environment design

During the conceptual and prototype design stage of an industrial product, it is crucial to take assembly/disassembly and maintenance operations in advance. A well-designed system should enable relatively easy access of operating manipulators in the constrained environment and reduce musculoskeletal disorder risks for those manual handling operations. Trajectory planning comes up as an important issue for those assembly and maintenance operations under a constrained environment, since it determines the accessibility and the other ergonomics issues, such as muscle effort and its related fatigue. In this paper, a customer-oriented interactive approach is proposed to partially solve ergonomic related issues encountered during the design stage under a constrained system for the operator's convenience. Based on a single objective optimization method, trajectory planning for different operators could be generated automatically. Meanwhile, a motion capture based method assists the operator to guide the trajectory planning interactively when either a local minimum is encountered within the single objective optimization or the operator prefers guiding the virtual human manually. Besides that, a physical engine is integrated into this approach to provide physically realistic simulation in real time manner, so that collision free path and related dynamic information could be computed to determine further muscle fatigue and accessibility of a product designComment: International Journal on Interactive Design and Manufacturing (IJIDeM) (2012) 1-12. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1012.432

Student Observations of Postsecondary Classroom Instruction: Accessibility Challenges and Collaborative Feedback.

For deaf students, accessible classroom design is often provided through external services such as interpreters or speech-to-text providers. An approach based in Universal Design for Learning (UDL), though, seeks to engage students in learning by creating classroom spaces with accessibility integrated into the pedagogical approach. Realizing these goals requires participation from one of the most valuable, yet underused, resources: the students themselves. To that end, this paper examines a student-faculty collaborative approach to increasing accessibility for deaf students in postsecondary classrooms. Results of this study suggest that student observers are able to provide concrete and constructive feedback on strategies to increase classroom accessibility

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Due to the technological and medical improvements and awareness of the patient- centered approach, architectural design interventions of nursing units in healthcare centers are becoming very important to provide a suitable care process. Among various nursing units, the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) environment needs to provide constant and quick access to patients in terms of visibility and physical accessibility. In this field, there is various evidence beyond the architectural filed such as medical, social, or nursing that clarifies the impacts of the visual and physical accessibility features on the patients' safety and staff efficiency in ICUs. These issues force healthcare architects to find ICUs' accessibility features by using different sources of knowledge from different disciplines. However, there are difficulties for healthcare architects to gather explicit knowledge in a systematic approach and consider them in ICUs' design process. Evidence-Based Design (EBD), as a systematic and scientific approach, provides a way for healthcare architects to gather scientific knowledge through the Systematic Review (SR). This study aims to evaluate the architects' concern about visual and physical accessibility in ICUs' design with the help of EBD. For achieving this aim, two ICUs were observed in Iran and Finland. Then, SR was conducted to find visual and physical accessibility features that impact the patients' safety and staff efficiency in ICUs. After that, ten healthcare architects (from Turkey) were interviewed with fifteen open-ended and close-ended questions. Finally, qualitative data were evaluated by referring to SR's findings. According to the results, there was a gap between design and scientific research in the ICUs' design process, and architects did not refer to any scientific research through the design process. It was found that the architects' knowledge about accessibility features was routed in various sources, including design guidelines, medical advisor, designed projects, personal experiences, and firm's demands through ICUs' design process. It is concluded that the EBD can improve the architects' approach to design a safe and efficient ICUs' environment.-Ph.D. - Doctoral Progra

An accessibility planning tool for network transit oriented development: SNAP

In the academic debate regarding the influences between urban form, built environment and travel patterns, a specific idea that has taken hold is that more compact urban development around railway stations, often referred to as Transit Oriented Development (TOD), contributes to the control of vehicle travel and to more sustainable metropolitan systems. According to this general principle this work proposes a GIS accessibility tool for the design of polycentric transit oriented scenario: SNAP - Station Network Accessibility Planning tool. In the first part the state of the art on Transit Oriented Development policies in Europe is presented with a focus on three study cases. In the second part the SNAP tool is described, with remarks to the approach, the methodology and the used indicators. Furthermore the paper discusses an application to the metropolitan area of Naples

The Prevailing Obstacles in Web Accessibility on Three Well-Known Websites for Older People with sight difficulties

Prior research has argued that there is no one best approach to evaluating web accessibility and proposes the adoption of multiple approaches. Following these proposals this research used three different approaches for evaluating accessibility on websites for accessibility to older persons with sight difficulties as there are advantages and disadvantages to each approach. Approached used included: (1) Using automated tools to determine accessibility, which looks at the code of websites to get a general overview of accessibility issues. (2) Manually looking at the design, code and also how it might impact the user. This involved a manual assessment of each of the websites and comparison to the WCAG 2.0 guidelines (3) the third aspect of Web 4 accessibility is looking at the visual, thinking skills or cognition required by the user to access the website. The user testing evaluation method involved participants completing tasks on each of the three websites while participants were being videoed, and asked them to speak aloud at the same time to reflect on accessibility issues. The participants were then asked to complete an exit-interview based on the Principles of Universal Design. The three approaches provided a complete holistic approach to accessing Web accessibility on the three key websites

A Theoretical Model for Measuring the Influence of Accessibility in Residential Choice Behaviour

Due to the renewed interest for Integrated Land-use and Transport models, the urge for sound models that describe the behaviour of the agents on the urban markets has grown. A preferred subject of study within this context is the empirical research into the influence of accessibility on the residential choice behaviour of households. However, despite of the effort of several researchers, this relationship seems hard to quantify. In this paper we present a theoretical design for a discrete choice model of the residential choice of households. From the existing knowledge from a literature review and new insights, we present a new approach for measuring the influence of accessibility on the residential choice process. This theoretical model exists of three main parts, namely: the unique information of households, the arrangement of households into certain destination groups and composing systematic choice sets to estimate a discrete choice model. Within this framework, an important role is set aside for the concept of subjective accessibility, being the individuals perception and utility of accessibility. Finally, we derived a Logit model that is able to combine the simultaneous influence of migration distance and commuting time.

Addressing Workplace Accessibility Practices Through Technical Communication Research Methods: One Size Does Not Fit All

Background: Accessibility of digital materials within workplaces continues to be an issue that is not readily and completely addressed through legal compliance and institutional policy. Despite the lack of marked improvement in digital accessibility, many continue to pursue a policy approach to accessibility, including checklists and guidelines. Literature review: Despite the attention paid to accessibility and surrounding issues by scholars in the field of technical and professional communication, little direction has been given to help practitioners advocate for accessibility in the workplace. Research question: Can common ground between institutional values and accessibility be discovered and leveraged to motivate value-driven accessibility? Research methods: Common ground theory was used to code and analyze data obtained from research interviews of 18 university instructors to determine how they consider accessibility within the process of developing their course documents. Data were coded and analyzed to discover common attitudes toward accessibility. Results and discussion: The data revealed that although instructors approached accessibility differently, all were motivated to work for student success, a fact that indicated common ground between instructor practices and accessibility. This finding suggests that accessibility advocates can motivate value-driven accessibility by leveraging common ground. Conclusion: I used the revealed common ground to inform the development of a digital accessibility resource, which underwent usability testing. My research-informed design process illustrates that despite institutional variability, technical and professional communicators can find and leverage common ground to move away from a singular, policy-driven approach to accessibility in favor of a more sustainable value-driven accessibility, which generates and supports long-term accessibility design

Design automation of microfluidic droplet sorting platforms

Both basic research and biological design require high throughput screening to parse through the massive amounts of variants generated in experiments. However, the cost and expertise needed for use of such technology limit accessibility. Simple and reproducible designs of a sorting platform would reduce the barrier for implementation of affordable bench-top screening platforms. Droplet microfluidics present a promising approach for automating biology, reducing reaction volumes to picoliter droplets and allowing for deterministic manipulation of samples. Droplet microfluidics have been used extensively for high throughput screening and directed evolution, yet limitations in fabrication have prevented the characterization needed for a design tool and subsequent widespread adoption. Here, we present a finite element analysis (FEA) model-based design framework for dielectrophoretic droplet microfluidic sorters and its preliminary experimental validation. This framework extends previous work from our group creating microfluidic designs tools, increasing their usability in the lab