AccessVis

Quick Info

Project Date Feb. 1, 2012 - Present
Sponsors: NSF
Keywords: accessibility, accessible cities, information visualization, physical world accessibility, accessibility map visualizations

Recent News

Manaswi Keynote Speaker at WSRO Conference

Sep 30, 2019 | Manaswi

Makeability Lab member Manaswi Saha was an invited keynote speaker to the Washingtion State Ridesharing Organization (WSRO) conference. She gave a talk on Project Sidewalk entitled Project Sidewalk: Mapping the accessibility of the physical world at scale using interactive computational tools.

Congrats Manaswi and thanks for representing the Project Sidewalk team.

Manaswi Saha Accepted into ASSETS'19 Doctoral Consortium

Aug 09, 2019 | Jon

Makeability Lab PhD student, Manaswi Saha, has been accepted into the ASSETS'19 Doctoral Consortium where she will present and receive feedback on her doctoral work entitled "Interactive Tools for Assessing and Understanding Urban Accessibility At Scale". Congratulations Manaswi!

Amazon Catalyst Award for Interactive Tools for Urban Accessibility

Jul 09, 2019 | Jon

We received an Amazon Catalyst award to fund Manaswi Saha's dissertation research on “Combining Computational and Visualization Techniques to Understand Urban Accessibility at Scale.” Congrats Manaswi!

High School Interns Earn Direct Admission Into Allen School

Jun 01, 2019 | Jon

Congrats to Summer 2018 interns Johnson Kuang and Shiven Bhatt from Inglemoor High School and Redmond High School, respectively, for earning direct admission into the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington.

Last year, Johnson worked on developing this Makeability Lab website while Shiven worked on Project Sidewalk. We are incredibly fortunate to have both Johnson and Shiven back in the Makeability Lab this year. Johnson is working on the AccessVis team while Shiven is working on Urban Accessibility Evolution

Project Sidewalk in the Local News!

Apr 30, 2019 | Manaswi

With the recent Seattle and Newberg launch of Project Sidewalk, we have been getting a lot of media attention. Here are a few articles so far (many more to come!):

Newberg streets second in nation to be studied with new accessibility metric (The Newberg Graphic, April 2019)
Seattle's got terrible sidewalks. You can help fix them. (Crosscut, April 2019)

About

A screenshot of one of our AccessScore prototype visualizations

Our interactive visualizations of city accessibility are intended to address questions like "is this region accessible?" and "why does this neighborhood have poor accessibility?"

Walkability indices such as walkscore.com model the proximity and density of walkable destinations within a neighborhood. While these metrics have gained widespread use (e.g., incorporated into real-estate tools), they do not integrate accessibility-related features such as sidewalk conditions or curb ramps—thereby excluding a significant portion of the population. In this project, we explore the design, implementation, and evaluation of neighborhood accessibility models and visualizations for people with mobility impairments. We are able to overcome previous data availability challenges by using the Project Sidewalk API, which provides access to 255,000+ labels about the accessibility and location of DC sidewalks.

AccessVis is part of the larger Project Sidewalk initative.