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This paper is a contribution to the Accessible Way-Finding Using Web Technologies. It was not developed by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) and does not necessarily represent the consensus view of W3C staff, participants, or members.

Extended Abstract for the RDWG Symposium on Accessible Way-Finding Using Web Technologies

Paving the Way to Open Physical Accessibility Information

• Christophe Ponsard. CETIC, christophe.ponsard@cetic.be
• Vincent Snoeck, GAMAH, vincent.snoeck@gamah.be

1. Problem Addressed

Finding information about the physical accessibility of places, roads and transportation is still a problem and raising questions like: how to gather and maintain large amount of data given the limited resource in experts, how to rely on infrastructure users/owners as input channel, how to enable the consolidation/sharing of data with across organisations or countries?

This paper focuses on recent concrete contributions done together with the CaWAB accessibility consortium in the French-speaking part of Belgium in order to progress towards more scalable approach, also learning from past mistakes and exploring recent ICT advances.

2. Background

This work is anchored in a long lasting Belgian initiative to build a reference framework for physical accessibility of ways and buildings based on a strong underlying ontology. In 2004, we defined a very complete methodology for the assessment of building call the “KeyPass Index” [4]. However it proved complex to deploy, resulting in a lack of adoption, poor efficiency and the difficulty to provide explanations in an easy to understand way for impaired end-users. Over the past few years, we started to explore how ICT could help improving this using a new generation of ICT tools such as social networks, Open Data, and routing engines [5].

3. Strategy

The main first decision was to simplify the method to reach a better trade-off between assessment completeness and effort. Moreover the simplification process was carried out by involving all the local accessibility associations active in the field and also consulting some external (French, Flemish) associations in order to gather a large reservoir of potential experts and secure its adoption.

A second action was to organize periodic trainings in order to increase the number of experts able to carry out accessibility assessments. Those trainings are carried out with employment agencies and have a certification exam which provide guarantees about the assessment quality. A strong ICT support was developed in order to provide e-learning capabilities and build an active community of accessibility experts.

A third and more R&D oriented action were directed towards the move towards new accessibility standards like ISO21542 [1], Open Data and end-to-end support for accessible trips.

4. Major Difficulties

The collective simplification was a long but rewarding process as it resulted not only in a simplified method but also in the foundation of a new association called CAWaB for the whole French-speaking part of Belgium.

On the technical side, deciding on the information structure and presentation was a large work, as well as making sure it would be accessible according to the WCAG2 compliant AnySurfer label. Some feedback channels are also available, for example in order to propose accessible events.

The organization of the community platform for accessibility e-learning and knowledge sharing also took a lot of effort to reach a design organized in progressive levels of expertise and also to adapt the selected Open Source Moodle platform for optimal usability and accessibility.

5. Outcomes

On the concrete side, the collective simplification process resulted in the Access-I website ( http://www.access-i.be) managed by the CAWaB consortium grouping all the accessibility associations active in the French-speaking part of Belgium. This organisation is also managing the local community of accessibility experts (called CENA) and coordinating an annual training session of three weeks supported by the dedicated eLearning and knowledge sharing platform that was developed ( http://cena.accessible-it.org). The information presentation is structured in 7 key profiles: wheelchair, people with walking problems (including elderly people), low sighted people, blind people, hard of hearing people, deaf people and people with cognitive problems. Each category is ranked using three levels (nothing forseen/not enough, accessible with ponctual help, fully accessible). More details are provided in text form and with pictures. The website is also accessible according to the WACG2 guidelines implemented by the AnySurfer association.

On the longer term research side, an inventory of available Open Data in the French speaking part was achieved, mostly related to accessible parking and real-time transportation data. Related ICT projects were triggered at the occasion of local hackathons (e.g. with the regional TEC bus company) [6]. Specific ontologies in order to process and combine them were identified and an interlinking approach similar to the University of Southampton is developing [3]. This work is still in early stage. The quality of accessible parking is poor in Wallonia but quite exhaustive for Brussels which also provide various exchange formats and easy geolocalisation.

6. Open Research Avenues

The current CAWaB approach is to rely mostly on accessibility experts with currently only few on-line feedback channels from the impaired users. Specific scenarios to provide such channels are currently studied based on different approaches like “J’accede” or “Inclusive London” [5] and especially to study how to best combine feedback from happy/unhappy end users with the more objective work by experts.

The importance of such feedback channels is increased by the growing availability of Open Data which may need to be challenged against its completeness and quality but could also call for improvement actions in case of a confirmed major lack of accessibility. In this process it is important to understand the existing processes and involved organizations in the data collection, validation and diffusion.

Until now our work has also mainly focused on the assessment of the buildings. This includes some limited assessment of the navigation within the building, its surroundings and the way to the public roads and transportation means. We have started to study how to extend this work to the end-to-end planning of the accessibility and especially conducting specific assessment of “public backbone” of a town (city centre, railway stations, schools, hospitals,…) Our current work is to exploit Open Street maps enriched with accessibility information with the help of Open Source routing and optimisation engine like Graphhopper and OscaR to compute optimal accessible routes [2].

Acknowledgements

Thanks to CAWAB for providing access to Access-I information and to my voice recognition software for understanding my French-accented English.

References

1. ISO: ISO21542 (2011), Building construction Accessibility and usability of the built environment, ISO standard.
2. R. De Landtsheer, Y. Guyot, C. Ponsard (2014), A high-level, modular and declarative modeling framework for routing problems, Proceedings of the 28th annual conference of the Belgian Operational Research Society.
3. C. Ding, M. Wald, G. Wills (2014). A survey of open accessibility data. Proceedings 11th Web for All Conference, DOI:10.1145/2596695.2596708
4. C. Ponsard, V. Snoeck: Objective Accessibility Assessment of Public Infrastructures. Proceedings of ICCHP 2006: 314-321. DOI: 10.1007/11788713.
5. C. Ponsard, V. Snoeck (2014) Unlocking Physical World Accessibility through ICT: A SWOT Analysis. Proceedings of ICCHP 2014, 136-143. DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-08599-9
6. C. Ponsard, R. Viseur, J.C.Deprez (2014), Building Smarter Cities through ICT-driven Co-Innovation. ERCIM News 2014(98)