“An Investigation into Accessibility Issues on Campus and the Proposed Solutions”
Creators: name: Prosch, Aaron
name: Jinaphant, Simon
name: Chen, Jeffrey
name: Catton, Sam
name: Tarka, Matthew
Publisher: name: The University of British Columbia
Year: 2017

description: The purpose of this research was to aid Access and Diversity in making a Campus Accessibility Map which would aid students and faculty that live with or without a disability in traversing the campus. People with different disabilities encounter different struggles in their everyday lives, and even without a disability, navigating such a large and diverse campus can be overwhelming with the constant change in infrastructure and layout that UBC experiences constantly. Therefore, data was collected through the use of a survey distributed to students at UBC, as well as through secondary sources such as articles and textbooks that discuss the difficulties those living with a disability face in terms of navigating through areas of inaccessibility. The two main disabilities that were tackled were visual and mobility impairments, simply because these disabilities had the most amount of research readily available, and because brainstorming led to the most interesting solutions when focusing on these disabilities. The main difficulties visually impaired people have is having a hard time navigating new territory they haven’t experienced yet, as well as not being able to see obstacles in front of them as easily as someone with vision can. With UBC’s constant construction and changing of routes one can and cannot take, the visually impaired must constantly learn new pathways and deal with uneven terrain when traversing the campus. Those with mobility impairments will often struggle with long distances, or in the case of a wheelchair user, have a hard time with inclines and slopes. Once again, uneven and gravel terrain due to construction and an ever-changing landscape also poses a challenge to the mobility impaired. The solutions proposed are two phone applications which provide real time data on construction and elevation changes to aid those with mobility impairments, and a method of creating braille maps for the visually impaired to use. The phone applications use data collected from Google Maps and UBC’s Campus + Planning website to map out the alternative routes created to bypass construction, and to find the routes that allow for the least amount of distance and elevation gain to minimize the difficulty of traveling long, difficult distances for the mobility impaired. The braille map is a method of using 3D printing or raised braille paper to produce physical copies of maps that can be mounted in specific locations on campus or printed for visual impaired individuals to carry with them. It should also be noted that during the research into finding solutions to the accessibility issues on campus, a handful of easy fixes that can be done cheaply and quickly to greatly improve cracks and tripping hazards from uneven ground were also found, and so have been included in this report as an alternate means of increasing accessibility to students, even though the solution is not in the form of a map. By the end of this report, the conclusion that a mobile application that can be updated instantly and maintained at a very low cost was decided to be the best way to implement the accessibility map, due to the fact that most users are students who use these smartphones and so the largest amount of people can be benefitted through this method. Disclaimer: “UBC SEEDS provides students with the opportunity to share the findings of their studies, as well as their opinions, conclusions and recommendations with the UBC community. The reader should bear in mind that this is a student project/report and is not an official document of UBC. Furthermore readers should bear in mind that these reports may not reflect the current status of activities at UBC. We urge you to contact the research persons mentioned in a report or the SEEDS Coordinator about the current status of the subject matter of a project/report.”