Disability: An Upside for Everyone in Unifying Smart City Design
How designing with accessibility and disability inclusion from day one benefits everyone.
Disabilities have a lot in common with many of the technology markets I have analyzed for the last 20 years: each was developed and considered in isolation, solutions were specific to each area, and the cost was excessive. Nothing united the disability segments just like nothing united the different streams of technology. Until now.
Historically, the technology available to help people with disabilities has been as complicated as the types and degrees of disabilities themselves. Whether the condition affected is physical, cognitive, hearing or vision, each circumstance had its own expensive gadgets and associated support structure. Now with the advent of the smartphone and tablet a new platform has emerged for the first time which stretches across the scope of all disabilities and also across mainstream services. Hence, we know have a robust entry point and new platform to leverage the diversity of perspectives, knowledge, and needs of the disability community — a billion people worldwide — that will provide benefits for everyone.
A number of Smart Cities are stepping up and making accessibility an inclusion a priority. In Seattle, accessible buses and light rail lines allow people who use wheelchairs to travel seamlessly across the network, while Portland’s LIFT paratransit service offers an essential shared-ride public transportation service for riders who are less mobile.
Taxis are also going along for the ride. Chicago plans to double its fleet of wheelchair-accessible taxis by 2018, and NYC’s “Taxi of Tomorrow” is wheelchair-friendly and comes equipped with induction loop technology — which magnetically transmits sound to hearing aids and cochlear implants. After all, being able to get around town is the right of every urbanite.
But accessibility isn’t just the domain of mass transit, and Smart Cities are working to make sidewalks and other shared spaces easier to navigate, too. Sydney, Australia is currently rolling out a network of Braille street signs accompanied by information pylons and digital technology — making it simpler for residents who are vision-impaired to navigate the city streets.
In Toronto, the StopGap Foundation has worked with its Community Ramp Project to make a number of businesses accessible for locals who are less mobile. With its range of brightly painted ramps that are easily seen, the organization has raised awareness and access in one fell swoop.
And in the Twin Cities, they’re making public spaces more accessible for children, too. The Madison’s Place Universal Access Playground specializes in adaptive play, providing 16,000 square feet of swings, ramps, and sensory play equipment for every child.
A key part of building accessible Smart Cities is making cultural institutions available to everyone. In New York, MoMA offers free programs, including guided touch tours and art-making workshops for visitors with disabilities. And The Metropolitan Museum of Art offers a monthly Seeing Through Drawing class for visitors who are blind or partially sighted, using a range of materials and verbal descriptions for creative inspiration.
Then there’s Frankfurt, which has also taken a creative approach to accessible Smart Cities tourism. Not only does the city host guided tours for travelers with disabilities, it also offers up landmarks like the Frankfurt Sensory Garden, which focuses on scent and touch.
Beyond phones, other apps and crowdsourced Smart Cities services are making city life simpler. Both the crowd-sourced Wheelmap and Jaccede (the latter of which was a winner of the Google Impact Challenge) map thousands of locations in cities around the world and grade them on their wheelchair accessibility.
Then there are apps like Assist-Mi, which offers real-time support for users with disabilities. Using location-based technology and two-way messaging, the app offers short notice cab bookings and other support features.
The lesson? Accessible Smart Cities are truly the wave of the future….
Designing with all citizens in mind, including the people with disabilities, ultimately makes services more accessible to everyone. And, by placing them in a common framework, Smart Cities services will be linkable and not isolated as in previous generations.
Smartphones, tablets, and wearables are at the heart of this drive for an inclusive Smart Cities society. Since the disability community represents one in seven of the world’s population, it is vital that we get this right. People with disabilities are economically powerful (representing some $4 Trillion of spending power worldwide) but have often missed out on getting online or benefiting from the digital services most people consider their basic human right.
Making Smart City services accessible to all will increase both their power and reach. The availability of different channels for communication, instant messaging, video, chat, and, of course, good old-fashioned voice, means that there are now multiple options if one channel is denied through disability. This is true for interacting with city services, but it is also true for helping people with disabilities enter the workforce and use different technologies to communicate with colleagues and customers alike.
The economics are also compelling. Standard smart devices with accessibility software and peripherals have replaced specialist equipment costing tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. Since we now have an app for everything, we need to ensure that mainstream apps are accessible to complement the specialist apps built for people with different disabilities such as sign language online or item recognition. Furthermore, including accessibility considerations from scratch from a digital product and service design point of view, avoids the ugly bolt-on solutions that we have endured for decades.
The point is, that if we design inclusively from day one, everyone will benefit.
Darren Bates is internationally recognized as a visionary strategic thought leader in global Diversity and Inclusion and Smart City Human-Centered Urban Innovation. Founder and President of Darren Bates LLC and the Founder and Chief Innovation Officer for the Smart Cities Library.™
Darren Bates LLC
Darren Bates LLC is a boutique global consulting firm that helps private and public organizations diversify their workforce by outreaching, hiring, retaining, and promoting qualified individuals with disabilities.
FMI: www.darrenbatesllc.com
Smart Cities Library™
The Smart Cities Library™ is the premier online resource for building and refining accessible and inclusive, human-centered Smart Cities that ensure no citizen is left behind or accidentally excluded due to the rapid pace of global urbanization and technology innovation.
FMI: www.smartcitieslibrary.com
Trademarks
▪︎ Building a Global Culture of Access and Inclusion™
▪︎A Smart City is a Connected City and a Connected City is an Accessible and Inclusive City™
▪︎ A City Isn’t Smart If It Doesn’t Include Everyone™
▪︎ Building a Culture of Access and Inclusion in the Modern Workplace™
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Special thanks to the Inventor’s Forum and Ziptopia “Future City” Blog contributions to this article.
