Princeton A11Y Accessibility Meetup - Janurary
Presentation Topic
The Open Accessible Pedestrian Signals (Open APS) project began as a response to New York City's Call for Innovation - Enhancing Mobility for Blind and Low Vision Pedestrians challenge. Between 2012-2016, NYC added roughly 25 accessible intersections per year. In 2016, the city committed to increasing this to 75 accessible intersections per year. While we applaud this rollout, we believe people who are blind and low vision deserve a more widespread accessible solution sooner. Price has been a significant limiting factor; each intersection costs about $43,000. Our proposal is based on providing free and open tools for generating the hardware and software assets needed to produce accessible pedestrian signals (APS) at a dramatically lower cost than the existing solution, with more features.
In this presentation, we will first discuss the background of accessible pedestrian signals, what they are and how they are used. We will then demonstrate and discuss the hardware and software components of our Open APS project. Finally, we will highlight technical accessibility barriers that exist in software-based maps and will demonstrate techniques for communicating spatial information in ways that are accessible to everyone.
Speaker Bios
Thomas Logan has spent the past fifteen years assisting organizations to create technology solutions that work for people with disabilities. Over his career Logan has worked on project deliverables for numerous federal, state, and local government agencies as well as private organizations from startups to Fortune 500s. He is the owner of Equal Entry, whose mission is: “to encourage more equitable access to information by raising awareness about the work in this field.” He is also co-organizer of Accessibility New York a monthly meetup for NYC’s community interested in topics related to accessibility and people with disabilities. Thomas lives in Brooklyn.
Chuck Groom is a software engineer and serial entrepreneur, with two successful startup acquisitions (BillMonk, Precision Polling). He most recently worked at SurveyMonkey, where he hired and managed the Seattle Engineering Office to build a new market research platform, SurveyMonkey Audience, from scratch to a $20m business unit. Chuck is the co-founder of Seattle Tech Startups, one of the largest tech entrepreneur communities in the country. Chuck recently moved from Seattle to Brooklyn.
Refreshments and Meet-and-Greet starts at 6:30 PM, the presentation begins at 7:00 PM.