Virtual Auditing

Virtual auditing is a method of assessing the accessibility of physical environments by remotely examining street-level imagery, such as Google Street View, rather than conducting in-person inspections. Research has shown that tool-mediated virtual audits of urban infrastructure have high concordance with traditional physical audits while being dramatically cheaper and faster to conduct. Virtual auditing enables large-scale data collection about sidewalk conditions, curb ramps, and pedestrian barriers by leveraging crowdsourced labor from volunteers or paid workers anywhere in the world, removing the requirement for local physical presence.