Accessible Street Directory of Madrid

Acronym of the case:

eStreetDirectory

Web address of the case:

http://www-1.munimadrid.es/guia/visualizador/...

Country of the case:

Spain

City/region:

Madrid

Posting Date:

1 December 2008

Last Edited Date:

08 January 2010

Author:

Antonio Lopez-Fuensalida (IAM Informatica Ayuntamiento de Madrid)

blind | mapping | municipal

Type of initiative

Project or service

Case Abstract

â€œGuia Urbana Accesibleâ€ (Street Directory of Madrid) , is an application that allows handicapped people to operate with an up to date street directory and search for addresses, points of interest and the hundreds of places we can find in a conventional street directory, and calculate the best route from a place to other (routing). The most relevant part of this innovative online service is that even totally blind people can use it, using a specific software (like Yaws) to listen the description provided by the Street Directory. As far as we know, there is no other suth street directory in the Internet.The system fulfills the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) level Double-A standards and the Accessibility Guideline Web Content 1.0 (WCAG 1.0).

Description of the case

Domain

eInclusion

Topic

(public) e-services for disadvantaged people | eAccessibility | ICT and community development

Sector

Culture and Media | Local/Regional Community Development | Social Services

Start date - End date

May 2008 (Ongoing)

Date operational

May 2008

Target Users

People with disability

Scope

Local (city or municipality)

Status

Operation

Language(s)

English | Spanish

Policy Context and Legal Framework

The street directory (available at http://www-1.munimadrid.es/guia/visualizador/GUaccesible/index.jsp) has been very well received by the handicapped people organizations. We understand that giving the possibility to the blind and disabled to use a geographical system to know the city of Madrid and find all the main places and transportations will have a important impact in that social group, offering a tool to facilitate their social integration.

Project Size and Implementation

Type of initiative

Inclusive services of general interest

Overall Implementation approach

Public administration

Technology choice

Proprietary technology | Accessibility-compliant (minimum WAI AA) | Not applicable/not available

Funding source

Public funding local

Project size

Implementation: €49-299,000

Yearly cost:

€1-49,000

Implementation and Management Approach

The system has passed a very strict accessibility test by means of an auditory carried out by Technosite, a technology company belonging to the ONCE Foundation and participating In the European Consortium for the Support â€“ EAM Project. The auditory was carried out by different handicapped people, including blind. The tests have been passed successfully, getting the EURACERT certificate

Technology solution

During 2006 the municipal corporation developed the Geographical Information System (GIS) with all the cartographic information available for Madrid. The interface of the GIS had an AA Accessible version, but the GIS was not published in Internet, only in the corporate intranet. During the first semester of 2007 we developed the Street Directory of Madrid, a simplified interface of the geographical Information system oriented to be used online by the citizens. Once the system was published in the website of the City Council the challenge of the project was to create an interface according with the standard AA Web 1.0 (WCAG 1.0). For that reason in the second semester of 2007 a new project was initiated to develop an AA accessible interface. At the end of 2007 one first version of AA Web 1.0 (WCAG 1.0) accessible Street Directory was available This version have been improved during the first months of 2008 and finally published in Internet in May of 2008.

Impact, innovation and results

Impact

The development of a AA Accessible Street Directory applying Geographical Information System technology is very complex. To develop a Street Directory usable by a blind is a challenge. In a regular web site AA, the textual information is organized according to the standard AA in the way that text can be read through specifics programs (Yaws for instance) and understood by the blind.

The development of AA Accessible Street Directory is quite complex. The information is geographical, numeric and graphic, and we have to transform it to a textual description. For example, if a blind wants to know the address of a restaurant and the public transportations to go, the system has to find the restaurant, locate the address in the map and through spatial analysis find all the entities of interest, in this case the public transportations (bus and underground). After that, the system has to transform the graphic information (the map information) in textual information under the standard AA to be read vocally.

The innovation of this project has been the ability to transform geographical information into textual information and the way in which the system allows to move through the map without using the mouse.

The benefit of such technology is that we can build all kinds of Geographical Information Systems usable by disabled and blind people, facilitating their social integration

Track record of sharing

The project has been developed as initiative of the Municipality of Madrid and with our own budget. The analysis of the application and the requirement catalog has been developed by technicians of the municipality. The development of the system has been carried out by Indra Sistemas, a Spanish company in the field of TI.

The project has received the TAW award (Test of Accessibility Web) to the Best Accessibility Web Project, an important award in Spain.

The system has been showed in several IT congress. We are open to show the system at a technical level to any Spanish or European corporation. In fact, some projects of the same characteristics are being developing by our technological partner for other institutions in Spain.

Lessons learnt

The project was considered in the beginning as a research, due to the technical difficulty and that we did not know any other Internet project with this specifications. We constituted a group to consider the viability of the project and to resolve issues. As a result, all parts involved have acquired an important knowledge about the technology needed to build a geographical information system accessible even for blind people. Now, we are applying this technology to other projects using geographic interfaces.

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