May 5th is the European protest day for equal rights of people with disabilities. In this scope the Heidelberg advisory board of people with disabilities organised an event at the Theaterplatz Heidelberg to raise awareness regarding the needs of disabled people. As in the previous year the CAP4access team from GIScience group of Heidelberg university joined and supported their event with hands-on activities and by providing insights in related research and applications.
The Heidelberg advisory board in cooperation with Adviva provided information about the facilities and ways to support people with disabilities. Moreover visitors could get an idea of what it feels like to have a disability by testing various prepared glasses that enable imitating impaired vision and eye disease and by taking part in a wheelchair obstacle cours.
The CAP4Access team presented specific applications, among others the OpenRouteService wheelchair extension and the Obstacle Tagger, which have been developed by the team to support route planning for people with mobility restriction. Moreover the team showed the visitors how to support these applications. Visitors had the chance to collect information about the wheelchair accessibility of POIs using Wheelmap, information regarding obstacles using the Obstacle Tagger as well as information about the surface, smoothness and incline of roads using Mapillary and Vespucci. The information gathered in Wheelmap is directly updated in the OpenStreetMap (OSM) and can therefore also be accessed in the Wheelmap application.
(photo credit: Remigius Wloczkowski, rewlo.de)
All data gathered through Vespucci is directly uploaded to OSM and, thus, also updated in the OSM based OpenRouteService. The Mapillary application moreover enables getting an idea of the given conditions on the ground in a “Street View” manner which can provide great support for people with limited mobility. The visible information can also be integrated in OSM and again utilized in the OSM based applications which are all openly accessible and free in use.
Newly added Wheelmap points (prior + after):
