Problem and Design Overview
While the AODA is gradually becoming law in Ontario, the vast majority of buildings – and means to access them – are not compliant. Currently, persons with disabilities must research their destinations thoroughly before embarking, in order to ensure that they can make the journey, enter the place and circulate the place without barriers. Significantly, even buildings that do comply with the Accessibility for Ontarians with Disabilities Act (AODA) guidelines may be effectively inaccessible to approach, as they are not close to accessible transit stations or parking lots and have no curb ramps. Even where there are accessible parking spaces available, there is no easy way to locate them ahead of time. Overall, there is no consistent or centralized way for people to plan their journeys and appointments with clarity and certainty that their access needs will be accommodated.
Design Proposal
The AccessCity app offers a centralized place for users with disabilities to do efficient and effective research into the accessibility of destinations. AccessCity's results cover Ontario, providing urban access information from the parking and public transit routes to inside the premises. The app enables members of the public to contribute to the database of accessible spaces and star ratings of them. To ensure accessibility guidelines are met, AccessCity integrates a review process by the app’s moderator employing the OBIAA Accessible Buildings Checklist, and auditors affiliated with the AODA. It’s the only app that can offer verified results, based on compliance with government and legal standards.
Project Scope
This project was undertaken as a Master's assignment with a limited scope. The requirement was to design for three key tasks, and I focused on parking and businesses, which constitute the greatest access gap for Ontarians at the moment. Currently, many public transit authorities across the province already do provide riders with discoverable accessibility information (such as the presence of elevators, tactile paving and audio announcements at stations and stops). For this reason, my efforts were not spent on producing screens and workflows for public transportation, as this would be a later addition to the AccessCity app. A later version would also include a prototyped community discussion board (as seen in the far right of my app’s bottom navigation) that would be a great place for local accessible communities to post about recommended accessible businesses, for instance.
How AccessCity Works
Below are a few storyboards that illustrate key user tasks while engaging with the AccessCity app.
In this first workflow, the user is searching for an accessible parking space, and beginning to navigate to it:
The second task involves a user adding a new accessible parking space to the AccessCity directory. They answer some basic questions about it, and then the space is submitted for a more formal accessibility review.
In this third task, the user is looking for an accessible cafe. They find one that is accessible for wheelchair users, people with hearing impairments, and those who are blind. Businesses would be audited and reviewed for people with a range of disabilities and access needs.
Accessibility of the User Interface
My priority with my choice of colours, shapes, icons and assets was to make information accessible: to make it perceivable and understandable, as stipulated by WCAG. The idea conveyed is inclusivity, functionality and reliability, which I believe comes through in the aesthetics of my design.
Colour and Contrast
My foremost concern was that the colour scheme I worked with was highly accessible with high contrast. To accomplish this, I created a palette for the maps that has Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) AAA compliant contrast ratios between the land colour, the street colour and the street labels. For these, I selected greyscale tones, since legibility is important and users with low vision may not be able to distinguish greatly between some hues anyway.
However, I did choose one primary colour to brand my app, which is based on the International Symbol of Access (ISA). The ISA always consists of a white icon with a blue background that is officially designated as the Federal Standard 15090 colour (International Code Council, 2012), or Hex code #00537B. This is a darker and less saturated blue than the one that I have chosen for this app. I brightened it up to a hue that approaches the blue in Google’s colour palette, while still ensuring it would contrast sufficiently against white for a ratio that is WCAG AAA compliant. I also chose one accent colour that would be used sparingly on elements that are intended to draw the user’s special attention. This vibrant red colour is used to indicated AODA-verified spaces and identify touch targets such as buttons.
Below are simulations of how the interface colour scheme would appear for those with the most common form of colour-blindness, Deutranopia, which I tested with Colblinder. There is still significant colour differentiation.
Text and Touch Targets
For optimal legibility, I kept all text sizes to 16 pixels at a minimum, and tags, addresses and buttons are rendered at 20px and driving directions are 24px for even better visibility. All touch targets have been designed large enough and far enough apart to ensure a generous and forgiving area for the tap of a finger. Text fields such as the address bar are 48px in the shorter dimension, and buttons are a 60px and greater.
Outcome and Impact
This project theme is all about the assignment's theme of “Urban Connectedness,” and what better way to bring people together than to make navigating cities more inclusive, and to highlight the businesses that are embracing accessibility. People with disabilities who use this app will have the potential to feel connected to spaces even before they have visited them, and they could feel more connected to the greater community that contributes to the app’s database of destinations in their towns and cities. Significantly, users will come to learn and know of more places, such as accessible cafes and restaurants, in which to connect with the people they care about. My app will literally open up doors to people who are all too often excluded from experiencing a large part of the urban fabric.
