Smart Cities and Accessibility
The grand vision of a city shaped and ran by technology is one of convenience, efficiency, and equality of access. Lives should become easier, cities should ultimately use less energy, and urban spaces should be open and accessible for everyone. The final point is the most important here — if the introduction of technology doesn’t make a city more functional for everyone, it doesn’t make a city more functional at all. Civic technology has to be, by definition, inclusive.
It is unfortunate, then, that many of the advancements that able people might take for granted actually have detrimental effects on the quality of life for the less able. Take touch screens, for example. Interactive screens are well on their way to replacing the majority of customer service roles, particularly in daily environments like supermarkets and train stations. Some wheelchair users, for example, have limited use of their hands and arms, making displays like these a hindrance to a convenient life rather than a help.
People with disabilities will often find life in a city preferable; they tend to have extensive public transport systems, better or more accessible social services, and infrastructure that better caters for the less able. It’s important, though, that other advancements made in large cities — like that of touch screens replacing customer service staff — have no detrimental effect on the lives of those that cities purport to want to help.
Keeping Disability in Mind
In the US, for example, there is no specific law that says municipalities should design their digital services with disabled people in mind. The tech community itself is often accused of being damagingly homogenous, made up predominantly of able white men across the industry. It’s not a problem of people not caring about creating barriers for the less able, it’s a problem of the industry not featuring enough less able people to highlight the problems.
Issues of representation are only compounded by the fact that a lot of US municipal governments are using social media to solicit feedback on their infrastructure. Not only does this all but exclude a lot of elderly people from the conversation, but it makes it disproportionately difficult for blind and low-vision people to offer feedback.
Harnessing People Power
Technology can make life for disabled people in cities easier, though, and people are taking matters into their own hands. Digital-accessibility apps are being built, which are essentially user-generated guides logging the accessible locations in a given city. The likes of AccessNow, Access Earth and Wheelmap are projects which highlight businesses that cater to disabled customers, a factor that will become more important as the likes of Google add similar information into their mapping.
Google has made steps to do so, too. In 2018, Google Maps was updated with “wheelchair accessible” routes in its navigation to make getting around easier for those with mobility needs. The previous year, it started letting users add accessibility details to their business listings, much like the apps mentioned earlier. Improvements are still there to be made and, naturally, there are plenty of listings with no accessibility information at all, but progress is visible.
“The [users] have multiple motivations, and one is wanting to help their own community get around.” says Laura Slabin, Google’s director of local content and community. “So we’re leveraging the fact that people are motivated by altruism.”
As explored by this piece in the Atlantic, the rise in crowdsourced accessibility maps hints at the simultaneous rise of a new kind of urban citizen: the smart citizen. These are people willing to give their time and energy to creating data about a city’s features, logging that data and thus contributing to a thriving smart urban environment.
‘Nothing About Us Without Us’
One problem facing these projects is the variety of disabilities that can make public spaces difficult. The inclusion of braille, the absence of flickering lights, the presence of chemical cleaners, a lack of stairs — people’s needs are varied and it is rare that establishments will tick every box necessary to cater for the entire population.
There is also a significant potential gap in knowledge between those logging the information and those using it. An altruistic customer might log a particular bathroom as accessible for wheelchair users because it doesn’t require stairs to access. They might not immediately realise that the hand dryers are placed too high, though, or that the room itself is too small for a wheelchair to comfortably manoeuvre in. This kind of incomplete or inaccurate information is partly where the use of the “Nothing about us without us” motto comes from.
A survey of over 250 experts found that 60% felt that smart cities are failing disabled people. This won’t, though, necessarily be solved by crowdsourced projects alone. Greater involvement from experts on disability and those who require assistance in the actual building of the smart cities of the future is the only way to ensure they cater for all. Improvements to transport through technology like driverless cars will benefit those unable to drive, while smart virtual assistants could make navigating various areas of city life less difficult, among a host of other potential improvements. If those building these technologies fail to take disabled people into account, though, the problems could get worse and not better.
