Focusing on Disability and Access in the Built Environment

Imrie, Rob; Kumar, M.Y.

doi:10.1080/09687599826687

Cited by 171 publications

(133 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…But the disability rights movement recognizes that legitimate social structures not only depend on the publicity of ideas and procedures, but also on the publicity of bodies. Institutionalization, inaccessible transportation and built barriers spatially mark people with disabilities as deviant and aberrant, bolstering justification for their exclusion (Imrie and Kumar, 1998). Both deliberative democrats and disability rights activists emphasize accessibility, but disabled advocates uncover new terrains of inaccessibility in deliberative theory and offer novel ways to surmount these barriers.…”

Section: Frank Haller: Publicity and Embodied Speechmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making disability public in deliberative democracy

Clifford

2011

Contemp Polit Theory

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Deliberative democracy harbors a recurrent tension between full inclusion and intelligible speech. People with profound cognitive disabilities often signify this tension. While liberal deliberative theorists sacrifice inclusion for intelligibility, this exclusion is unnecessary. Instead, by analyzing deliberative locations that already include people with disabilities, I offer two ways to revise deliberative norms. First, the physical presence of disabled bodies expands the value of publicity in deliberative democracy, demonstrating that the publicity of bodies provokes new conversations similar to rational speech acts. Second, the inclusion of people with profound disabilities necessitates a form of collaborative speech in which individuals make claims collaboratively. Habermas offers an ideal site to pursue this analysis because he recognizes the theoretical tension between inclusion and intelligibility and because his personal testimony reveals important insight into the lived experience of disability. Contemporary Political Theory (2012) 11, 211-228. doi:10.1057/cpt.2011.11; published online 26 July 2011Keywords: deliberative democracy; Habermas; reciprocity; disability; dependency The disability rights motto of 'nothing about us without us' (Charlton, 1998) speaks both to the long history of exclusion of people with disabilities and to deliberative democratic theorists' commitment to inclusion. Deliberative democratic theorists and disability rights activists see inclusion as a linchpin of legitimacy and as a method to transform participants' beliefs. Aggregate models of democracy, in contrast, fail to capture the political participation of people with profound emotional and cognitive disabilities who are either disenfranchised by law or prohibited from voting due to the severity of impairment itself (Appelbaum, 2000). Deliberative theorists' promise of inclusion, however, is threatened by their conception of participation as reasonable speech acts. By neglecting alternative modes of non-verbal and embodied communication, deliberative theorists disable the speech of multiple populations.Disabled speech affects persons who are refused the opportunity to speak because their mode of communication defies reasonable and coherent r

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Section: Frank Haller: Publicity and Embodied Speechmentioning

confidence: 99%

Making disability public in deliberative democracy

Clifford

2011

Contemp Polit Theory

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“…Although great improvements have been made through high profile legislation -such as the Equality Act 2010 (Great Britain, 2010) and The Disability Discrimination Act 1995 (Great Britain, 1995) -access to the built environment and transport infrastructure remains an area of great concern (Ray and Ryder, 2003). Imrie and Kumar (1998) highlighted that under present practices a fully accessible built environment may be elusive. However, as demonstrated by Essex County Council's try a [bus/ train] days (Options for Independent Living, 2010), the experience of public transport for persons with disabilities is reliant on the effective and efficient implementation of services catering for a wide range of needs.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Capturing Volunteered Information for Inclusive Service Design: Potential Benefits and Challenges

et al. 2013

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“…Accessibility barriers in the built environment pose significant problems for people with ambulatory disabilities [21,26,65,71,91,127,129,152,177]. Knowing where and what barriers exist can help affected travelers mitigate, prevent, or better prepare for such problems [21,127,135,167].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scalable methods to collect and visualize sidewalk accessibility data for people with mobility impairments

Hara

2014

Proceedings of the Adjunct Publication of the 27th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology - UIST'14 Adj

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Poorly maintained sidewalks pose considerable accessibility challenges for people with mobility impairments. Despite comprehensive civil rights legislation of Americans with Disabilities Act, many city streets and sidewalks in the U.S. remain inaccessible.The problem is not just that sidewalk accessibility fundamentally 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.To address this problem, my Ph.D. dissertation introduces and evaluates new scalable methods for collecting data about street-level accessibility using a combination of crowdsourcing, automated methods, and Google Street View (GSV). My dissertation has four research threads. First, we conduct a formative interview study to establish a better understanding of how people with mobility impairments currently assess accessibility in the built environment and the role of emerging location-based technologies therein. The study uncovers the existing methods for assessing accessibility of physical environment and identify useful features of future assistive technologies. Second, we develop and evaluate scalable crowdsourced accessibility data collection methods. We show that paid crowd workers recruited from an online labor marketplace can find and label accessibility attributes in GSV with accuracy of 81%. This accuracy improves to 93% with quality control mechanisms such as majority vote. Third, we design a system that combines crowdsourcing and automated methods to increase data collection efficiency. Our work shows that by combining crowdsourcing and automated methods, we can increase data collection efficiency by 13% without sacrificing accuracy. Fourth, we develop and deploy a web tool that lets volunteers to help us collect the street-level accessibility data from Washington, D.C.As of writing this dissertation, we have collected the accessibility data from 20% of the streets in D.C. We conduct a preliminary evaluation on how the said web tool is used.Finally, we implement proof-of-concept accessibility-aware applications with accessibility data collected with the help of volunteers.My dissertation contributes to the accessibility, computer science, and HCI communities by: (i) extending the knowledge of how people with mobility impairments interact with technology to navigate in cities; (ii) introducing the first work that demonstrates that GSV is a viable source for learning about the accessibility of the physical world; (iii) introducing the first method that combines crowdsourcing and automated methods to remotely collect accessibility information; (iv) deploying interactive web tools that allow volunteers to help populate the largest dataset about street-level accessibility of the world; and (v) demonstrating accessibility-aware applications that empower people with mobility impairments.

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Focusing on Disability and Access in the Built Environment

Cited by 171 publications

References 6 publications

Making disability public in deliberative democracy

Making disability public in deliberative democracy

Capturing Volunteered Information for Inclusive Service Design: Potential Benefits and Challenges

Scalable methods to collect and visualize sidewalk accessibility data for people with mobility impairments

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