ICT, facilitating tools for living and enjoying a barriers-free city

Abstract

Starting from the premise that one of the main objectives of any society should be to provide an accessible and barriers-free environment for all people, this article is developed. The main objective is to present a synthesis of the work carried out within the framework of the project City whitouth barriers, tool for evaluation and visualization of accessibility to public space based on TLS, GIS and GPS technologies. In addition is explained its main result; a tool to assess accessibility and information on optimal routes in urban environments.

For this, in a first stage the context of the accessibility situation is developed. Are presented some statistics of the characteristics of the population with functional diversity, as well as concepts such as universal accessibility. Also are indicated the contributions that the new Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to improve the accessibility conditions.

A brief analysis is made of the current state of accessibility assessment methodologies, as well as the technologies used in the development of previous assessment tools. Then, the specific developments within the framework of the project and the results thereof are explained.

With respect to these, it is indicated the importance of performing accessibility calculations on a precision metric basis (in this case a MDT) obtained through TLS, based on previously tested parameters. Finally is explained the importance of the calculation tool of optimum routes, obtined directly as results of the evaluation parameters in all possible surfaces of both cases studied, available both in Web and App.