Towards Ubiquitous Accessibility Digital Maps for Smart Cities

Designing indoor and outdoor spaces to become accessible for people with disabilities is of paramount importance. Accessibility leads to improvements in human rights and business outcomes; due to inclusion of a broader range of the population. For example, adding braille writing to signs and installing ramps allow visually-impaired people and the wheel-chaired to navigate on their own. While digital-maps have evolved in recent years to become a part of our everyday life, available ones primarily cover vehicular roads only with limited, if any, accessibility information. This highly limits the range of applications they can support. In this paper, we present our vision for ubiquitous accessibility digital-maps for smart cities; where the maps' indoor and outdoor spaces are automatically updated with the various accessibility-features and marked to assess their accessibility levels for the different disability types such as vision-impairment, wheel-chaired, deafness, etc. To realize this vision, we describe an architecture for a crowd-sourcing-based system to automatically construct the accessibility maps. In addition, we discuss the multi-disciplinary challenges that have to be addressed to materialize it as well as the current pioneering efforts in the research community related to our vision.