Space-Time Representation of Accessible Areas for Wheelchair Users in Urban Areas (Short Paper)

Providing personalized information on the accessibility of urban places for people with disabilities can significantly increase their social participation. This information should be adapted with respect to their needs at the specific time and space. Location-based technologies are considered as proper services to provide such information and encourage mobility of these people in urban areas. However, generally these services focus on the spatial conditions of the accessibility and ignore users’ capabilities and time dependent constraints. This is much more challenging for people with disabilities given the diversity of their physical capabilities and preferences. To address this issue, we propose an approach to measure the space-time accessibility of urban areas considering environmental characteristics, users’ capabilities, and time constraints. The proposed approach is unique and it highlights time constraint that is rooted in time geography theory. Unlike the classical time geography, which suggests a uniform travel velocity, we consider a variable travel velocity in the proposed approach, which is more relevant to the mobility of people with disabilities. To implement the proposed method, a Fuzzy approach is applied to evaluate the wheelchair speeds for the segments of a pedestrian network. The proposed approach is implemented in Saint-Roch, Quebec City for a case study and the results are presented and discussed. 2012 ACM Subject Classification Human-centered computing → Accessibility technologies