Recent work has indicated that prior research is insufficient to support the ADA Accessibility Guidelines' (ADAAG) 2% maximum cross-slope requirement for sidewalks. In addition, the present ADAAG are inflexible in that they do not consider deviations from this maximum for short sections of sidewalk, such as at driveway crossings, which can be of significant concern for state and local departmen...

Tailored routing and navigation services utilized by wheelchair users require certain information about sidewalk geometries and their attributes to execute efficiently. Except some minor regions/cities, such detailed information is not present in current versions of crowdsourced mapping databases including OpenStreetMap. CAP4Access European project aimed to use (and enrich) OpenStreetMap for ma...

Nowadays, Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) has increasingly gained attractiveness to both amateur users and professionals. Using data generated from the crowd has become a hot topic for several application domains including transportation. However, there are concerns regarding the quality of such datasets. As one of the most famous crowdsourced mapping platforms, we analyze the fitness ...

Criticism is not merely a good thing; the discipline requires it to advance. Precisely because it is so important, criticism must be held to high scholarly standards. As I will show, Wacquant’s review of Sidewalk quotes selectively and misleadingly and systematically misrepresents the work as a whole. The review is thoroughly inaccurate and unreliable. Forty years after Jane Jacobs wrote The De...

INTRODUCTION During travel over sidewalks, pedestrians encounter pathway risks that may lead to falls for all people, including manual and power wheelchair users. In fact, falls are the most common source of injury for wheelchair users [1], and the majority of these events occur during travel over poorly-maintained outdoor pathways [2]. Additionally, wheelchair users experience dangerous whole-...

In this paper, we present the development of an algorithm for sidewalk following for a mobile robot. The algorithm classifies pixels of a video frame as either sidewalk or background. The classification of pixels is performed using color histograms of the hue and saturation of various areas of an image taken by an on-board camera. This color histogram approach allows the algorithm to detect and...

The visual accessibility of a space refers to the effectiveness with which vision can be used to travel safely through the space. For people with low vision, the detection of steps and ramps is an important component of visual accessibility. We used ramps and steps as visual targets to examine the interacting effects of lighting, object geometry, contrast, viewing distance, and spatial resoluti...