Personalized accessibility map (PAM): a novel assisted wayfinding approach for people with disabilities

Abstract

Accessibility information is necessary to support the everyday mobility of people with disabilities. As a service to aid the mobility of students with disabilities, some universities and colleges provide maps with accessibility information for their campus on the Web. Other maps, while not focused specifically on students, provide information about indoor accessibility and can be extended by users. In this paper, accessibility requirements published in the literature, the criteria used in existing geo-crowdsourcing services and the data used by campus accessibility maps (which are commonly based on the ADA standards) are used to provide an optimal set of requirements for personalized accessibility map (PAM). PAM is discussed and analysed in detail, a prototype PAM developed for the University of Pittsburgh is described, and challenges and future work are highlighted. © 2014 Taylor & Francis