On the occasion of the European protest day for equal rights of people with disabilities the Heidelberg advisory board of people with disabilities organised an event at Heidelberg castle. Every year on these specific days, particular organizations plan relevant activities in order to raise awareness of the needs of disabled people including those with limited mobility. This year, the CAP4access team from GIScience group of Heidelberg university contributed by leading a mapping event at Heidelberg Castle garden.
For the mapping event, a total number of 10 participants performed mapping of accessibility related information for certain objects such as footways, stairs and their conditions, including surface, smoothness and incline. For this purpose, the participants were taught how to use data collection applications such as Mapillary and Vespucci (OSM editor for Android devices). The participants were divided into 4 groups in the different time slots. Overall, a total length of ways of 1600m has been covered with images for Mapillary and a number of 15 ways got new tags for incline, smoothness and surface on OpenStreetMap (cf. Figures below). Information like this is directly or indirectly valuable input for OpenRouteService.org.
Besides the statistics of mapping, it is important to note that several participants were not aware of the needs of geospatial data, as well as what options they could use in order to assist in mapping their cities. Therefore, raising the awareness is a key point that was done during this event as well as previous events done before.