On-Site and Remote Crowdsourcing of Accessibility Data for People with Mobility Impairments: A Case Study in Zurich’s District 1

Abstract

Collecting accurate accessibility data systematically for pathways is a time-consuming task that typically requires expert knowledge. However, it is a prerequisite to enable reliable and trustworthy accessible routing. The development of Capture & Go, a mobile application to report barriers for people with mobility impairments, facilitates the on-site collection of crowdsourced accessibility data. Several other mapping tools contain accessibility data, although they have not been developed explicitly for this purpose. In contrast to Capture & Go, they allow data collection to be performed remotely. Using quantitative and qualitative approaches, we analyzed several such applications and examined their efficiency in capturing barriers in a case study of District 1 in Zurich. The remotely collected data was compared to the data of the barriers captured on-site using Capture & Go. Overall, the remote tools were less efficient than Capture & Go in terms of effort, coverage, and accuracy of the barriers, as well as usability.