Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmarks

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Project Date Jan. 1, 2013 - June 1, 2014
Sponsors: NSF
Keywords: crowdsourcing accessibility, visual impairments, bus stop auditing, crowdsourcing, accessible bus stops, crowd-powered streetview accessibility

About

Bus Stop CSI (Crowdsourcing Streetview Inspections) Tool

We built a system that allows crowd workers to collect detailed information about bus stops using Google Street View (GSV) to improve accessibility. Crowd workers are asked to label the landmarks in a GSV image. The image shows actual labels from crowd

Low-vision and blind bus riders often rely on known physical landmarks to help locate and verify bus stop locations (e.g., by searching for an expected shelter, bench, or newspaper bin). However, there are currently few, if any, methods to determine this information a priori via computational tools or services. In this article, we introduce and evaluate a new scalable method for collecting bus stop location and landmark descriptions by combining online crowdsourcing and Google Street View (GSV). We conduct and report on three studies: (i) a formative interview study of 18 people with visual impairments to inform the design of our crowdsourcing tool, (ii) a comparative study examining differences between physical bus stop audit data and audits conducted virtually with GSV, and (iii) an online study of 153 crowd workers on Amazon Mechanical Turk to examine the feasibility of crowdsourcing bus stop audits using our custom tool with GSV. Our findings reemphasize the importance of landmarks in nonvisual navigation, demonstrate that GSV is a viable bus stop audit dataset, and show that minimally trained crowd workers can find and identify bus stop landmarks with 82.5% accuracy across 150 bus stop locations (87.3% with simple quality control).

Publications

Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View: An Extended Analysis

Kotaro Hara, Shiri Azenkot, Megan Campbell, Cynthia Bennett, Sean Pannella, Robert Moore, Kelly Minckler, Rochelle Ng, Jon E. Froehlich

TACCESS 2015

keywords: accessibility, crowdsourcing accessibility, google street view, low-vision, public transport, bus stop auditing, crowdsourcing, blind users, accessible bus stops, remote data collection

PDF | doi | Citation • Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmarks

Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View

Kotaro Hara, Shiri Azenkot, Megan Campbell, Cynthia Bennett, Sean Pannella, Robert Moore, Kelly Minckler, Rochelle Ng, Jon E. Froehlich

Proceedings of ASSETS 2013 | Best Paper Award

keywords: crowdsourcing accessibility, google street view, accessible public transit, blind, low-vision, accessible urban navigation, mechanical turk, data collection, accessible cities

PDF | doi | Citation | Talk • Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmarks

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