Global Resources and Promising Practices for Building and Refining Accessible and Inclusive Smart Cities from Darren Bates LLC.
How Human-Centered Design Helps Smart Cities Reach Their Goals Smart cities are becoming increasingly popular across the globe, with many cities introducing technology-driven initiatives to improve the standard of living for its citizens. As technology is becoming an ever-growing part of our daily lives, cities are turning to human-centered design to make sure that their technological initiatives are able to…
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PHILADELPHIA—The City of Philadelphia today announced SmartCityPHL’s new challenge, SEPTA for All: Augmenting Transit with Augmented Reality. The challenge invites innovators to submit ideas that would use augmented reality technology to make public transit more welcoming, comfortable, and accessible to people with disabilities. Applications are due August 2, 2021. “The pandemic amplified how critical public transit is to Philadelphians,” said…
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Traveling to work, meeting friends for a catch up or just doing some shopping are often taken for granted by people with no known disabilities. For the visually impaired, these seemingly simple things can be a serious challenge. But imagine a city equipped with technology that enables the visually impaired to recognise people, places or even bank notes, helping them…
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Abstract Of the many features that smart cities offer, safe and comfortable mobility of pedestrians within the built environment is of particular importance. Safe and comfortable mobility requires that the built environments of smart cities be accessible to all pedestrians, mobility abled and mobility impaired, given their various mobility needs and preferences. This, coupled with advanced technologies such as wayfinding…
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As many city environments are still designed to support an able-bodied working population, older people risk being excluded from the social and economic life of the city, especially when they lose functional ability. Age-friendly urban environments are therefore essential to enable a good quality of life across the life course, including the ability to age healthy and actively, with dignity,…
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One of the principles we lift up in our report is to “build with, not for” affected communities. For technology to deliver on the promise of increased inclusion, design and implementation need to be grounded in the needs and priorities of communities. To do this equitably requires actively engaging and listening to residents throughout the process.
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To ensure #SmartCities are correctly constructed for the elderly, it is necessary to include them in the planning phase. Young people cannot understand the issues faced by the elderly. such as climbing up the stairs or walking on an uneven sidewalk.
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Human rights must be put at the centre of development plans for smart cities. Civil servants should have a deep understanding of the technologies they are contracting, and enforce public procurement specifications that protect against abusive or wrongful use of the technologies. Technology needs to have safeguards to ensure that its use is consistent with human rights standards.
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How does Melbourne rate compared to other cities, and whose responsibility is it to bring it up to scratch when it comes to making it livable for everyone? Ever heard of the city of Breda in southern Netherlands? The tiny municipality of just over 180,000 people is one of the most accessible places in the world, winning the 2019 Access…
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Do you think New York City can be the most accessible city in the world? That’s Victor Calise’s goal. He’s the Commissioner for the New York City Mayor’s Office for People with Disabilities, and Jay spoke with him about how his disability catapulted him into his professional journey. They discussed what accessibility on a broad scale means, and how his…
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What Should Be The Criteria For A Fully Accessible Smart City? Ask The Disabled! Smart cities are failing to satisfy the basic public needs of the disabled – say 60% of the global experts as per a new survey conducted by ‘Smart Cities for All’. Although activists and startups are working to provide a better urban environment for the disabled.…
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When the Amazon Kindle was released, their ebooks didn’t work with commonly used screen readers, making accessibility difficult for the blind community. The National Federation of the Blind (NFB) in the United States campaigned to change this for years, in vain. Then Amazon won a $30 million USD contract with the New York City Department of Education in 2015 to…
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Public authorities, transport operators, civil society organisations and other public and private sector stakeholder in Greater Lyon have been successfully improving accessibility addressing it as a cross-cutting issue and investing substantially in creating a barrier-free and inclusive environment.
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Researchers with the Global Disability Innovation Hub, co-led by UCL (University College London) in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT-Delhi), are developing wheelchair-accessible maps of Delhi, India. Described as Street Rehab, the collaborative project has been conceptualized with innovative sensing platforms. This is how it works. UCL has arrived at low-cost sensors that can identify features of…
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The city government said this roadmap will serve as a guide on how Philadelphia can adopt smart city solutions to better serve residents and businesses The city of Philadelphia has released the SmartCityPHL roadmap, which outlines three key strategies aimed to spur innovation and collaboration in the community related to smart city projects. The city’s mayor has signed an executive…
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In the summer of 2018, start-up companies Lime and Bird flooded the streets of my hometown of Dallas with their electric scooters, which were followed by Razor scooters in the fall. Lime brands itself as “Smart Mobility for the Modern World,” and its Web site says that the company “is founded on the simple idea that all communities deserve access…
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Location shouldn’t be a barrier and neither should a disability. Disability groups have been lobbying for better accessibility on transport for many years. How many times have you got on a train to find there was a lack of space for wheelchair users, or that there wasn’t a toilet on board? For many people this can be extremely limiting.
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Whether for work or personal enjoyment, reading has long-lasting social and cognitive benefits. However, for seniors experiencing barriers to reading such as low vision or a physical impairment, using traditional print materials is a struggle, if not impossible. Benetech’s growing library of over 685,000 accessible titles, Bookshare, enables seniors to read in ways that work for them, choosing from a…
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Accessible Public Transportation and Housing, a Need for People with Disabilities in Major Cities This article is part of a series of stories on disability inclusion. – Even though over six billion people—nearly one billion of whom will have disabilities— are expected to live in urban centres by 2050, many of the world’s major urban cities have a long…
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Cities sometimes fail to make sure the technologies they adopt are accessible to everyone. Activists and startups are working to change that. Victor Pineda travels the world to make speeches and advise governments on urban planning and development. But when he encounters a touch-screen kiosk, he’s stymied. For people like him, who use wheelchairs and have limited use of their…
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