NSF Convergence Accelerator Track H: Towards a Community-Driven Framework for the Creation and Impact Analysis of Digital Accessibility Maps with Persons with Disabilities

As a means to address national health, prosperity and welfare and to promote the advancement of science, the proposed project has the long-term goal of improving accessibility for persons with disabilities (PWDs) within and around indoor built environments through the creation of MABLE (Mapping for Accessibility in BuiLt Environments). MABLE will provide digital accessibility maps of indoor environments with an interface for assessing, planning, and navigating within them based on the affordances and capabilities of the user.

It will also permit map augmentation by users based on their experiences or observations. Envisioned users include those with visual or mobility impairments (blind, low vision, wheelchair users, cane users, etc.) as well as other categories of PWDs with planning and navigation assistance needs. MABLE will enhance the ability of PWDs to navigate within mapped work environments so that they may feel more at ease within them quickly and accomplish navigation-based tasks easily, especially in large companies spanning multiple floors or buildings.

Being a universal need, MABLE applies to public spaces (shopping centers, event venues, sports venues, etc.) for which there is a positive economic benefit to increased accessibility, just as much as it does to private or access controlled indoor spaces (company campuses, commercial multi-story buildings). The project will create new knowledge in the areas of collection, processing, and evaluation of accessibility information from built environments.

The project will also create new frameworks for quantifying economic benefits from accessible built environments encompassing perspectives of future economic growth potential, cost savings, and return on investments. Long term outcomes from this project will impact both the quality of life and employability of PWDs. Detailed built environment information gathered and made available from this project will not only enhance mobility for PWDs, but also provide economic benefits to others, regardless of disability.

Greater participation of PWDs in society promises to change entire social structures of families that include PWDs. Activities within the proposed project to realize these societal impacts include workshops and webinars with stakeholders from the disability community, educational and curricular offerings, and tech transfer activities.

Recent advances in indoor localization technology provides opportunities to enable real-time navigation and wayfinding within built environments, but this progress is being held back by the lack of detailed and usable accessibility information. Commercially available maps require voluntary contributions from the general population and often do not include accessibility information, with contributions from persons with disabilities (PWDs) being limited or non-existent.

Open source or crowdsourced initiatives for indoor mapping have similar properties, though their open nature means they can be extended by interested developers. However, for this approach to be scalable, usable, and more widespread, mechanisms are required to automate the mapping process and to augment the maps through crowdsourced or user contributions in a universal manner.

The goals for the proposed project are to create a community-driven framework and prototypes for information collection, processing, analysis, and use towards accessible maps, navigating, and wayfinding for PWDs within indoor environments, as embodied by the product MABLE (Mapping for Accessibility in BuiLt Environments). The creation of MABLE will involve specification and development of five core components: (i) an accessibility meta-data schema for indoor maps and the back-end mapping database server, (ii) a robotic system for semi-autonomously exploring a given space and establishing the baseline accessibility meta-data, (iii) a web-based interface for querying, exploring, and planning with the augmented maps of known indoor spaces on standard computers, (iv) an interface for contributing accessibility meta-data to an existing digital accessibility map, and (v) mobile device applications for in situ use of the digital accessibility maps.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.