Web2.0 for people with disabilities
Smartmobs.com points at a winning entry in the Prix Ars Electronica, which is an European Award (Austrian to be precisely) for new media initiatives that aim at improving quality of life. One of the winning entries for the 2006 edition is Barcelona Accessible:
Barcelona Accessible illustrates how 40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet.
The result is a map of Barcelona’s inaccessibility for those confined to wheelchairs, a cartographic representation of the parts of town that are closed to people with handicaps. In this way, 3,578 architectural barriers and stumbling blocks have been documented on canal*ACCESSIBLE since December 2005
Link: Smartmobs.com
Link: Prix Ars Electronica 2006
Comments
Nice idea, but a pity that the people in wheel-chairs completely forgot about people with poor eyesight (some of whom also have mobility problems):
These “accessibility” web pages are highly inaccessible to anyone who uses “screen reader” software.
eg. No “alt text” for images; no text descriptions of locations or problems; poor navigation between pages; etc. etc. etc.
Most of the photos seem unlikely to have come from a basic camera-phone.