A Universal Design Approach to Wayfinding and Navigation

This paper investigates the problem of urban accessibility and proposes a system for the generation of accessible paths in an urban university campus. Universal Design has been adopted to explore the different perspectives of the involved stakeholders; an interdisciplinary team has iteractively developed a web application targeted at public administrators and two versions of a mobile app (one for Android and one for iOS) to be used by citizens. The mobile app is able to propose and guide users on paths that best fit their characteristics and preferences; for example, if a user declares some motor and/or visual impairement, the app proposes paths that avoid the architectural barriers related to such impairments. Not only pedestrian paths are considered in the system, but also routes for private cars or public transportation, and thus information about reserved parking lots and limited traffic zones are also managed. The app has been currently tailored to the campus of the University of Brescia, which is distributed in different districts of Brescia, a town in northern Italy; however, it can be easily scaled to other organizations or whole towns, since Google Maps and its APIs have been used as mapping service. Twenty five participants, including blind people and persons with motor disabilities, have been involved in the evaluation of the usability and accessibility of the two versions of the mobile app.