Although there are many applications for outdoor environments, there is a great lack of knowledge about indoor accessibility. Especially the knowledge about barriers and facilitators in a building is essential for orientation and navigation in indoor spaces. For example, it is important for people in wheelchairs to know whether a building is accessible via step-free entrances, ramps or elevators.
Searching for these information requires a lot of time and is often not possible without help from other persons. Therefore, information about indoor environments in particular should be made available to people with disabilities to enable travel to unfamiliar buildings.In the AccessibleMaps project, accessibility features that are important for people with disabilities were systematically collected and analyzed. For this purpose, an extensive literature review was conducted.
In addition, a collaboration was initiated with the Sozialhelden, the creators of Wheelmaps.org, who have been working for years on information about the accessibility of buildings, especially for people in wheelchairs. Our research lays the groundwork for making this information available to be used in maps, for instance through the OSM crowdsourcing plattform.
The synchronized data consisting of AccessibleMaps, OSM and A11yJSON features can be downloaded from the following link and are freely available:
https://services.access.kit.edu/accessibility-features/
They have been released under CC-BY 4.0 license.
