The Future of Urban Accessibility for People with Disabilities: Data Collection, Analytics, Policy, and Tools
Jon E. Froehlich, Yochai Eisenberg, Maryam Hosseini, Fabio Miranda, Marc Adams, Anat Caspi, Holger Dieterich, Heather Feldner, Aldo Gonzalez, Claudina de Gyves, Joy Hammel, Reuben Kirkham, Melanie Kneisel, Delphine Labbé, Steve J. Mooney, Victor Pineda, Cláudia Fonseca Pinhão, Ana Rodríguez, Manaswi Saha, Michael Saugstad, Judy Shanley, Ather Sharif, Qing Shen, Cláudio Silva, Maarten Sukel, Eric K. Tokuda, Sebastian Felix Zappe, Anna Zivarts · 2022 · Proceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS 22) · doi:10.1145/3517428.3550402
Summary
This workshop paper frames urban accessibility as a "wicked problem" spanning transportation, urban planning, disability studies, public health, and human geography, and assembles a remarkably diverse team of 28 co-organizers from six countries across academia, government, NGOs, and industry. The paper opens with a stark assessment: our cities are broken. The UN's New Urban Agenda acknowledges widespread inaccessibility in built environments, and this inaccessible infrastructure creates and reinforces systemic exclusion of people with disabilities while impacting public health, physical activity, and quality of life for everyone. The workshop poses ten provocative questions about the future of urban accessibility, covering multi-stakeholder perspectives, data collection and standardization, the role of AI, policy enforcement, personalizable mobility models, global differences in urban accessibility needs, climate justice intersections, and effective data visualization for policy change. The paper documents the current fragmented landscape of accessibility data: tools like wheelmap.org, projectsidewalk.org, and unlockedmaps.com collect data on places, sidewalks, and transportation respectively, but no open standards exist for what data to collect, how to measure it, or how to format it for interoperability. Emerging standards like the OpenSidewalks Schema and the W3C's Linked Data for Accessibility Group are attempting to address this gap.
Key findings
The paper reveals striking gaps in urban accessibility infrastructure and data. Of 178 US cities studied, only 60% had open data portals, only 34% included sidewalk information, and far fewer tracked accessibility features like crosswalks (19%), curb ramps (17%), or audible crossing controls (7%). In a study of 401 government agencies, only 54 (13%) had published ADA transition plans and only seven met minimum ADA criteria. Seattle's first comprehensive sidewalk audit in 2017 cost $400,000 to survey 2,300 miles, identifying 92,000 uplifts, 38,000 surface problems, and 20,000 obstructions — yet the city lacked infrastructure to keep this data current. The paper identifies multiple emerging approaches to automated data collection including LiDAR scanning, computer vision on street-level imagery, wheelchair-based sensors, robotic surveying, aerial drones, and crowdsourcing — each with distinct tradeoffs in accuracy, cost, scalability, and bias. Popular walkability indices like Walkscore.com and the US National Walkability Index do not incorporate accessibility features like sidewalk conditions, accessible transit stops, or curb ramps, making them exclusionary for disabled users.
Relevance
This paper is essential for understanding the physical infrastructure dimension of accessibility that complements digital accessibility work. For practitioners focused on web accessibility, this research highlights that accessible digital maps, transit apps, and wayfinding tools are only useful if the underlying data about physical accessibility exists and is accurate. The ten questions posed provide a comprehensive research agenda: from ensuring diverse stakeholder perspectives in design processes to developing AI systems that assess built environment accessibility without reinforcing geographic or socioeconomic biases. The international scope — with co-organizers from the US, Mexico, Netherlands, Germany, UK, and Australia — underscores that urban accessibility is a global challenge shaped by local infrastructure, disability rights legislation, and cultural context. The intersection with climate justice is particularly forward-looking, noting that disabled perspectives have historically been excluded from climate policy despite climate change disproportionately affecting disabled people.
Tags: urban accessibility · built environment · pedestrian infrastructure · sidewalk accessibility · data collection · crowdsourcing · computer vision · accessible maps · transit accessibility · walkability · ADA compliance · climate justice · Global South accessibility
Standards referenced: ADA · UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities