"Accessibility Map" and "Social navigator" services for persons with disabilities

• Main Authors: Kirill A. Kulakov, Yury A. Apanasik, Anton I. Shabaev, Irina M. Shabalina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: FRUCT
• Series: Proceedings of the XXth Conference of Open Innovations Association FRUCT
• Online Access: https://www.fruct.org/publications/fruct15/files/Kul.pdf

The paper describes development process of information environment for persons with disabilities. Introduction describes the aim and objectives of development, the results of evaluation of typical demands and user scenarios for persons with disabilities. The first section of the main part describes common applications architecture and utilized technologies. Both services use the same data model, which includes description of route parts and roads, as well as information about accessibility of objects stored in the database of “Accessibility Passports” service developed previously. The next section contains description of the development process. The user scenarios, service functions, the use of Geo2Tag platform and Open Street Map with its libraries are presented. In “Social navigator” service the routes are described as a graph with weighted edges, where the weight is the rate of accessibility of the path parts. The mathematical method for estimation of accessibility according to various types of ability restrictions was developed and implemented in the service. The method is based on graph theory and provides an approach to formal ranging of the routes according to the accessibility level of persons with limited mobility.