The United Nations Convention on the Rights of People with Disabilities recognizes the right of people with disabilities to attain full social participation without discrimination on the basis of disability. Furthermore, mobility is one of the most important life habits for achieving such participation. Providing people with disabilities with information regarding accessible paths and accessible urban places therefore plays a vital role in achieving these goals. The accessibility of urban places and pedestrian networks depends, however, on the interaction between human capabilities and environmental factors, and may be subdivided into physical or social factors. An optimal analysis of accessibility requires both kinds of factors, social as well as physical. Although there has been considerable work concerning the physical aspects of the environment, social aspects have been largely neglected. In this paper, we highlight the importance of the social dimension of environments and consider a more integrated approach for accessibility assessment. We highlight the ways by which social factors such as policies can be incorporated into accessibility assessment of pedestrian networks for people with motor disabilities. Furthermore, we propose a framework to assess the accessibility of pedestrian network segments that incorporates the confidence level of people with motor disabilities. This framework is then used as a tool to investigate the influence of different policies on accessibility conditions of pedestrian networks. The methodology is implemented in the Saint-Roch neighborhood in Quebec City and the effectiveness of three policy actions is examined by way of illustration.

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Mobility is fundamental for social participation. Everyone benefits from pedestrian networks for their mobility and daily activities. People without disabilities may have little difficulty walking on narrow sidewalks, over potholes, and so on. However, people with motor disabilities (PWMD) may find it more difficult to deal with such conditions. For PWMD, even routine trips are often fraught with problems, with many different obstacles restricting their mobility and consequently rendering their participation in social and recreational activities difficult. The potential problems and risks associated with mobility for PWMD could be significantly reduced if navigation systems provided them with appropriate accessible routes. These routes should consider PWMD’s personal capabilities as well as sidewalk-network conditions. In this paper, we propose a novel approach for computing a user-specific route for PWMD. Such a route is personalized based on the user’s confidence to deal with obstacles such as slopes, uneven pavement, etc. We show how user reported confidence levels could be used to aggregate sidewalk conditions in a routing model to offer user-specific routes. The proposed methodology was developed using a fuzzy approach and is evaluated by manual wheelchair users in Quebec City.

ABSTRACT:Social dimension of environment is an important aspect that should be reflected in research works related to studying the interactions between human and the environment. However, this dimension is usually neglected when representing the environment in geographic information systems for different applications. For instance, disability as a result of the interaction between human and environment is influenced by social and physical dimensions of environment. Although, this aspect is highlighted in most conceptual disability models by defining various taxonomies of the environment, from ontological perspective justifying and connecting social dimension to the physical dimension of the environment is not clearly determined. Integrating social dimension of the environment with its physical dimension for disability studies is a challenging task, which is the main objective of the present study. Here, we review some of the disability models and their perspective about classifying the environment. Then, from ontological perspective, their limitations are discussed and a new approach for the classification of concepts form the environment is presented. This approach facilitates and simplifies integration of social dimension in ontologies for more effective assessment of disability issue in Geographic Information System.