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Re: Describing accessibility of places Introduction

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From: Chaals McCathie Nevile
Date: Nov 13, 2015 3:53AM

On Fri, 13 Nov 2015 09:30:09 +0100, _mallory < <EMAIL REMOVED> >
wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 11, 2015 at 01:00:18PM +0100, Chaals McCathie Nevile wrote:

>> - schema.org description of the accessibility of places. There are
>> literally millions of places described using schema.org metadata.
>> Adding some information about the physical accessibility would be
>> very helpful. We need to develop a vocabulary for this that starts
>> small enough to experiment. I have looked at similar, more focused
>> efforts, and there is a lot of valuable thinking but it is unclear
>> if anyone has really tried to do this at the scale of "all the web"
>> yet, and things for schema need to work on that scale to be
>> acceptable.
>
> Such a thing could get more planet-wide coverage if it (at a later
> point) became integrated into all the carryable/wearable tech people
> have with them. Instead of checking into 4square, their devices
> could let them add/update information about some physical place they're
> at. As Much Automation As Reasonably Achievable could cover a lot of
> space.

Yes. But we're right now in the territory of baby steps, so that when we
get there we can be confident that we only make new and interesting
mistakes :)

In particular, I hope to have stuff that is experimental and introductory.

And as a general background, we need things that are easy enough that
people don't get them wrong, otherwise the data becomes useless. The
approach is very much geared to "find a place that is OK for *me*" rather
than "find a place that did a good job meeting accessibility requirements
in general".

My first thinking was to have "x-wheelchairFriendlyNotes" and
"x-problemsForWheelchairs". The idea is that the former is likely to be
filled in by the people who are promoting a venue, pointing out all the
good things they have done, and the latter by people reviewing, who might
have a different experience.

The thinking is that this will help us get a sense of what people are
prepared to describe in practice, as well as some sense of how to handle
granularity - for example many bars in Madrid have zero to two steps,
which makes them accessible to some wheelchair users in some situations.
They often have the toilet downstairs, which again is useful information.
As bad as it is in a general sense, not everybody actually uses the toilet
in a bar.

But that got some pushback. An alternative proposal was "can a wheelchair
get into the front door?" Which I would be OK with except that it wasn't
set up as something we could use and I didn't follow it up.

cheers

Chaals

--
Charles McCathie Nevile - web standards - CTO Office, Yandex
<EMAIL REMOVED> - - - Find more at http://yandex.com