launched in 2017, letting pedestrians tailor routes for their accessibility needs and preferences — an alternative to the one-size-fits-all pedestrian directions in a system like Google Maps. But the app, created in the 91̽��’s Taskar Center for Accessible Technology (TCAT), was limited to parts of Seattle. Over the years, including Everett, Mount Vernon and Bellingham.

Now, AccessMap is stretching across Washington state. A new data set called OS-CONNECT maps sidewalks and other pedestrian paths statewide, from Forks on the Olympic Peninsula to Clarkston in the southeast. In , the Washington State Legislature assigned TCAT to build the data set, which the team completed well ahead of its projected 2027 goal. The team will now perform deep quality checks, work with the different communities to analyze and interpret what the data means to them, and engage citizens in actions that promote public participation in data and active transportation. .

“No state has before used machine learning and human vetting to collect, in a consistent, standardized way, all of the pedestrian infrastructure in that state,” said , TCAT’S director and a research principal in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering, where TCAT is housed. “OS-CONNECT helps us answer the original question the state asked: ‘Who has access to frequent transit?’ And now we can answer many other questions, such as: ‘What type of access do people with diverse needs have to important services like grocery stores, schools and health care?’”

The state compiled OS-CONNECT using TCAT’s , which combines machine learning with human vetting to catalogue pedestrian infrastructure. For instance, using the data set through the AccessMap app, a person using a wheelchair can plan a route only on streets that have sidewalks, don’t have an incline of greater than 5% and have curb ramps for any intersections.

The data can help local governments identify where sidewalks are in poor condition or missing. OS-CONNECT supports Walkshed, an accessibility app for urban planners, and  projects such as , a model for equitable infrastructure design, and , a Seattle project to end traffic deaths and serious injuries by 2030.

“Not only are we including all sidewalks in Washington, which is huge,” said Caspi. “But we are engaging communities and planners in a massive effort to support data production and the maintenance of this resource long term, to make it sustainable and translatable to other institutions. This way states across the U.S. could start using it.”

For more information, contact Caspi at uwtcat@uw.edu.

For many, moving around is easier thanks to technology. Tools like Google Directions and OneBusAway give up-to-date travel and transit information, making unplanned, serendipitous travel seamless and convenient.

But not everybody has benefitted. Mobility applications focus on efficiency and finding the shortest paths, leaving out information critical to people with disabilities, older adults and anybody needing more support.

Now, the 91̽�� is leading a team working toward a solution. Two 91̽��centers, together with Microsoft, Google, Washington Department of Transportation and other public and private partners, are collaborating on the .

The U.S. Department of Transportation in January as part of a program focused on promoting independent mobility for all.

“Transportation and mobility play key roles in the struggle for civil rights and equal opportunity. Affordable and reliable transportation allows people access to important opportunities in education, employment, health care, housing and community life,” said project lead , director of the , part of the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering at the UW.

“Our goal is to translate the UW’s accessible technology research and data science products into real-world use, building technology foundations for good and avoiding repetition of exclusion patterns of the past or creation of new travel barriers to individuals.”

Three demonstration applications will be built as part of the UW-led initiative, addressing the challenges of underserved populations and showing how the data can be used. The Taskar Center’s Multimodal app will facilitate A-to-B trip planning for people with mobility limitations. The Soundscape app, developed by Microsoft, will enable spontaneous travel for people who are blind and visually impaired. 3-D Digital Twin, developed by San Francisco video game company Unity Technologies, will be a 3-D virtual reality simulation tool that will allow older adults and multilingual travelers to explore, assess and visualize a trip. The applications will be deployed in 2022 in six counties in Washington, Maryland and Oregon.

Initiative co-leader , director of the at the UW, got excited four years ago when he first learned about the Taskar Center’s  project — a core component for the initiative — which creates a data standard and data pipeline to describe the pedestrian environment. This fills an information gap for individuals, cities and transit agencies.

“We don’t know how many people walk, or where they walk, or what paths work for them. We don’t know how far they have to walk to get places,” Hallenbeck said. “If you can’t measure any of that, how can you make those conditions better?”

Inadequate information makes it harder for those underserved by current mobility applications to fully participate in life. They might need to know if sidewalks are available, if traffic-lights have auditory cues or how steep a hill is. They might need more information about transit stations, including the layout, or the status of specific infrastructure features, like elevators. On-demand transit services, like paratransit or community shuttles, do not currently publish routes and schedules in data streams for mobility apps, although these services are critical to how some people with disabilities, veterans, rural and Native American populations, and others get from place to place.

The Taskar Center conducted a pilot study with participants who have mobility limitations. It asked them to plan a two-block trip in an unfamiliar neighborhood. Using Google Directions and Google StreetView, participants reported that it took between 90 seconds and nine minutes to plan their trips. They spent up to four hours planning a single trip with other tools, such as Google Earth.

To address the information needs, the team will develop consistent data standards related to the pedestrian environment, transportation stations and hubs, and on-demand transit services, such as paratransit and rural community shuttles. The team will then publish and maintain APIs and data tools that will support apps consuming the data.

Community input and participatory design is central. The team invites travelers with accessibility concerns and professionals working in transportation departments, land-use planning and human service departments to take part.

The team hopes these data pipelines will have uses beyond the development of these apps, including addressing needs for pedestrians of all abilities, data-driven city and transportation planning, and future innovations, like robot delivery.

“Developing and deploying these tools, and their use of accurate, detailed information about pedestrian spaces, travel environments and travel services, is a critical challenge if we are to steward healthy, inclusive, and resilient cities around the globe,” Caspi said.

For more information, including how to get involved, go to . You can contact Caspi at caspian@cs.washington.edu and Hallenbeck at tracmark@uw.edu.

The will bring 91̽��researchers from many fields together with public officials, corporate practitioners and others to discuss how the rise in exponential technologies such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, big data and Blockchain help build a healthy and ethical society.

The event will be from 8:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. at the Global Innovation Exchange (GIX), in the Steve Ballmer Building, 12280 NE District Way in Bellevue.

The event is co-hosted by the and GIX. Several Evans School  faculty will attend and discuss their research, including , , and . of the Information School, co-creator of the iSchool’s popular “Calling BS” class and website, also will speak.

Giving an opening keynote will be , professor in the Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering and the , as well as co-executive director of GIX. , also of the Allen School, the eScience Institute and director of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, will speak as well.

Badshah of the Evans School, who is organizing the event, said the summit is already over capacity with 280 expected attendees. He said while other universities have convened such conversations among academics, companies or policyholders, this is the first such dialogue across multiple sectors.

The summit will feature sessions on social justice and equity, exponential technology and entrepreneurship and financial services, data mapping, health and societal transformation and more.

Also attending will be U.S. Rep. Susan DelBene, D-Wash., State Senator Manka Dhingra and members of the Bellevue City Council.

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For more information or for press access, contact Badshah at akhtarb@uw.edu.

Transportation routing services primarily designed for people in cars don’t give pedestrians, parents pushing bulky strollers or people in wheelchairs much information about how to easily navigate a neighborhood using sidewalks.

For someone with limited mobility, using sidewalks or pedestrian paths in an unfamiliar area can be like driving without directions and hitting dead end after dead end. Obstacles include hills that are too steep for wheelchairs or people with certain health issues to climb and sidewalks without sloped “” that allow people using wheeled devices to safely and easily cross intersections.

On Wednesday – a 91̽�� project spearheaded by the — launched a new online travel planner offering customizable suggestions for people who need accessible or pedestrian-friendly routes when getting from point A to B in Seattle.

It will also route people around Seattle’s ubiquitous building and construction sites that can close sidewalks for entire blocks, forcing people who are traveling on foot or using assistive devices to embark on unforeseen detours.

The team of student engineers and computer scientists, through its project, is also creating a and toolkits that will eventually let users in Seattle and other communities crowdsource and map detailed, real-world conditions on pedestrian pathways and intersections — from sidewalk widths and problematic surface conditions to the presence of ramps, handrails and adequate lighting.

“The big highlight now is our ability to offer automated routing and accessible travel planning for Seattle residents who may have mobility challenges or may simply want to find the easiest way to navigate a neighborhood with a toddler on a tricycle,” said Taskar Center director . “Identifying routes that optimize not for time or distance but for things like changes in elevation and curb cuts is a really big and important change.”

Information that allows for safe, accessible travel planning on pedestrian pathways previously did not exist in one place or in a user-friendly format. While it is particularly useful for people with disabilities, information about elevation and curb ramps can also help delivery drivers who push hand trucks, people on crutches or knee scooters, travelers hauling luggage to a light rail stop or children learning to bike or roller skate.

The AccessMap team won a in 2015 and subsequently participated the summer program sponsored by the eScience Institute, Urban@ 91̽��and Microsoft. They compiled and cleaned up disparate data from local and federal sources on street elevation, curb cuts and other accessibility features to create a zoom able map of Seattle’s sidewalks and pedestrian paths. People could consult that online map to pick more accessible or pedestrian-friendly routes on their own.

Now, AccessMap allows someone to type in a starting and ending destination in Seattle and receive automated route suggestions. Users can customize their preferences to avoid hills of a certain grade or navigate around construction sites.

For example, the pedestrian directions from University Street Station on Second Avenue to Seattle City Hall on Fifth Avenue on Google Maps route people up Seneca Street, which has a steep 10 percent grade that’s problematic for people in wheelchairs or with certain injuries or health conditions. By contrast, AccessMap sends people two blocks north to Pike Street, which has a much gentler grade of less than 2 percent.

The research team has recently expanded its focus to create new pedestrian standards for , a crowdsourced global mapping effort that relies on volunteers to create detailed, up-to-date maps of street conditions. The team is working to create easy-to-use editing tools that will allow people anywhere to enter detailed information about sidewalks, paved trails and other pedestrian paths.

They have identified 10 urban areas with active mapping and advocacy communities with promising expansion potential: New York, Washington DC, Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Portland, Pittsburgh, Denver, Philadelphia and Atlanta.

“We hope to be able to crowdsource all kinds of information that relates to accessibility: where a sidewalk may be cracked or buckled because of a tree root, other obstacles, inclines, lighting, how smooth the surface is, whether there’s tactile paving,” said , a 91̽��electrical engineering doctoral student and project technical lead for AccessMap and OpenSidewalks. “Our goal is to have a set of toolkits and instructions so other municipalities and local communities can get their own mapping efforts up and running.”

The OpenSidewalks project is also partnering with the Seattle Public Schools and the City of Seattle on the initiative, which aims to increase the number of kids walking and biking to school. They hope to introduce materials and app-based toolkits this fall that will allow students to gather and upload information about the quality and safety of sidewalks and intersections around their schools.

“We want to teach and promote little citizen scientists to survey a one-mile radius of their school communities in more detail than someone sitting on a couch and looking at aerial maps could,” said Caspi. “Then they can upload the information to a permanent and publicly accessible site, where it can be used to guide investments that will benefit all types of sidewalk users.”

Projects have been funded by the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology at the 91̽��Department of Computer Science & Engineering, eScience Institute, Urban@UW, the Ford Blue Oval Network, 91̽��Vertically Integrated Projects and the Seattle Department of Transportation Hack the Commute Hackathon.

Additional team members include 91̽��human centered design and engineering master’s student , electrical engineering doctoral student and computer science and engineering undergraduate student and Urban@ 91̽��graduate research assistant .

For more information, contact Caspi at caspian@cs.washington.edu or Bolten at bolten@uw.edu. Note: The newest version of AccessMap with customizable routing is located at /.

Off-the-shelf toys often require some force or dexterity to activate, making it frustrating, difficult or impossible for children with limited motor abilities or developmental disabilities to play with them.

On Dec. 11 at the , community volunteers will disassemble and rewire toys from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. at the 91̽��’s to make them more accessible for children with disabilities.

The housed in the 91̽��Department of Computer Science & Engineering, with support from the , and , is hosting the event. are required to attend.

The event is an opportunity for community members to learn about the adaptive needs of people with limited motor abilities or developmental disabilities, and to gain hands-on experience in toy adaptation. Fifty toys will be adapted this year, chosen by parents, caregivers and providers for the intended recipients from a list of toys selected for adaptability, function, sensory stimulation and educational factors.

Volunteers will start with off-the-shelf battery-powered toys. Many have buttons or inputs that are inaccessible to children with disabilities. But with a few simple electronic hacks, volunteers can adapt toys to make them switch-accessible, which means that a child who was previously unable to operate the toy now can.

Twenty students already skilled in toy adaptation — many of whom were trained by 91̽��Bioengineering Outreach — will be stationed around the makerspace as team leaders whom volunteers can approach with questions.

Toy adaptation opens up new avenues and customized solutions to allow children with limited motor abilities or developmental disabilities to interact with the toys independently. In many cases, the children who will receive the hacked toys are unable to interact with most toys currently on the market. These toys have many functions beyond play, allowing special needs students to interact, engage in community functions, find joy and learn.

While the Taskar Center event is in its second year, it is larger than the previous effort thanks to support from donors and collaboration with the 91̽��Human Ability & Engineering Lab and 91̽��Bioengineering Outreach.

“ 91̽��has a long history of advancing accessible technologies,” said , director of the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology.

“I was so glad to get together with others at 91̽��Engineering who are interested specifically in toy and play adaptation, an area that has played a major role in our activities for the past two years,” Caspi said.

The collaboration has also spawned the launch of Husky ADAPT, an initiative across 91̽��Engineering to engage students in universal design of play and to organize events and outreach opportunities throughout the year that will create a community of practice around toy and play adaptation.

To learn more about the Taskar Center for Accessible Technology, visit 

To donate a toy, contact uwtcat@uw.edu

To request a toy for a person with a disability, please fill out the form at: 

To sign up for announcements from HUSKY ADAPT, sign up at .