[Accessibility] Introduction to the list (Ed Hillsman)

[Lulu-Ann at gmx.de]

Hello list members!

Hello Ed,

welcome to the list!

First of all, I can only speak for myself, not for the whole OSM community or the list.

> Amazingly, our university does not have a map for general distribution  
> that shows sidewalks and crosswalks. 

This can be changed immediately :-)
This is how Tampa' Campus looks right now:

http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=28.05586&lon=-82.41847&zoom=15&layers=B000FTF

> Our office of disability services is also interested,  
> and we are looking at how to enter data to support the needs of  
> disabled users as well as to favor the generation of routes that  
> pedestrians will find appealing in our car-centric campus and  
> surroundings. 

Great, I guess that's the right spirit, and the right mailing list!
Hope you can encourage some disabled students to join the mapping
or at least do some testing.

> We probably will need to clarify the use of some tags,  
> and create some additional tags, to do this. 

Yes, a lot of tags need to be proposed, but unfortunately it's not always easy to find a good solution.
You can just try out your new tag inventions and then present success and problems in the wiki and on the talk mailinglist (and here, of course).

> For example, we know that  
> unless vehicle speed on a street is very low (30 kph), pedestrians  
> feel safer if there is a planting strip or parkway to act as a  
> psychological buffer between the sidewalk and the street than if there  
> is not; the present tagging system does not seem to represent this  
> space. 

Correct and not.
US American buffer green (as I got to know it in my visits) is often so wide you can tag it as an area.
There is a controverse discussion on the wiki and on the "talk" mailing list about "lanes and lane groups":
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/lane_and_lane_group
I guess the green buffers could be one of the "lanes" to define.

> We will need to clarify how to represent pedestrian crossings  
> of streets, which the Maryland example seems to have paid little  
> attention to (for example, although they coded stairs, I do not find  
> anything in their campus data on curb cuts or on inclines, which with  
> the extent of stairways on the campus should be of importance). 

The wheelchair routing project of University of Bonn, Germany has given example how to tag for wheelchair needs. Unfortunately the pages are not completely translated to English. Who can help ?

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wheelchair_routing

> I have  
> friends who can ascend shallow stair inclines but not steep ones, so  
> we would like to code inclines for stairs as well as sidewalks. 
Not the incline - the angle does not help to determine the hight of a 
step. If you have a fix incline, you can have few long high steps or many small short steps. That's still a big difference.
I would recommend to tag step hights.

> And we  
> will need to decide how to integrate the treatment of sidewalks with  
> parking lots, which occupy a lot of space on our commuter campus and  
> which often serve as de facto pedestrian ways as students take short- 
> cuts across them; some sidewalks run along the perimeter of the  
> parking lot rather than originating or ending at the lot, and some of  
> the bounding sidewalks have no curbs because the parking spaces  
> immediately adjacent to them are reserved for drivers with disabilities.

Sounds to me like highway=service, foot=yes, and connected highway=footway.
What problem is caused with the lowered or not lowered curbs? 
Can you give an example of a routing problem?
 
> You won't find any evidence of this on the map for our campus yet.  
> We've purposely asked students interested in OSM to hold off working  
> with the campus until we get a student project going to upload a file  
> of campus infrastructure that they can then field check and clean up.  
> So the few features coded on the campus came from people learning how  
> to use GPS for mapping, or how to use Potlatch.

I don't like this "don't map now" for several reasons:

1. It does not help to complete the map fast.
2. You do not have the right to stop someone from mapping. Nobody has. Nobody can reserve an area for oneself to map. That's not OSM spirit.
3. When someone comes who does not listen to your advice and starts mapping, then your students will be angry or disappointed. Any tourist can! All you do is taking away the "we were the first" feeling. And you are burdening the basic work on the shoulders of the project people, who will want to work on details, not on drying their clothes because they had to go mapping in fall to have data to work on.
4. I don't think the upload of a campus infrastructure helps a lot.
If it does, scan it, use it. Right now. Scanning and using the old map takes an hour, the reading how to do it included. So not a minute delay to stop your students from stepping out the door and mapping the campus. They won't be back before one hour. If you have copyright issues with your campus infrastructure map, it will usually take longer to clarify them than to map the whole campus alone.
OpenStreetMap is not a project with a start and an end. OpenStreetMap lives. Please DON'T STOP IT because you want work to be left for any project. The work will be much more interesting if the basics are done and you can concentrate on working on the details about accessibility.
The footways already mapped are in the map for one month today.
Your campus map could already be finished for approximately two weeks considering the standard tagging, and you could already have expericence on the contradictions of micro mapping for disabled persons, that you can share with others around the world.
 
> We also have preliminary approval for a project this fall to develop a  
> prototype multimodal trip planner (bike to bus to walk), using OSM as  
> the data platform.
For that you would not want anybody else to hold some students back from mapping bus stops, would you? ;-)

> We are still awaiting final approval before we can  
> begin, so what we do now is on our own time. Once the project starts,  
> I imagine that my colleague will subscribe to the list as well. He has  
> worked with location-aware services for developmentally-disabled bus  
> riders (using a cell phone to prompt riders when to request a stop and  
> when to get off the bus). 

Great idea - if you include local services, like RFID at bus stops or similar, please consider to realize them as plug-ins, so in other areas other local services can take the place.
Can you post the website of the project with the bus stops, please?
Is it an open software license?

> We plan to draw heavily on his experience  
> and computer-science expertise in this project and the campus routing  
> service. My role is more in the geography and the human/social  
> interaction with the built environment.

I hope you are not loosing out of sight the interaction with the OSM community - that's much more important than using the software.
You can always draw heavily on the OSM user's experience ans computer-science expertise alswell. :-)
If you invent new tags and can not convice the community, your work will not be proceeded.

I think there should not be any "campus routing service". There should be a worldwide routing service with one campus as a pilot area. ;-)
 
> I would welcome hearing from and working with others who have similar  
> interests.

Here is a link to "OSM for the blind", that want's to improve tagging for blind persons. At the moment only using the software Loadstone-GPS:

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/For_the_blind

I hope more persons from the list take the opportunity to introduce themselves!

Thanks, Ed!

Regards
Lulu-Ann




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