The other day I was visiting a community in Illinois for the day and met a local personĂ‚Â who was very excited about the new playground equipment being installed in his neighborhood. He encouraged me to check it out since he said it was the first time the community had upgraded the site since his…
Tag: ADA
Mapping the Accessible Path
The Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) team, a group out of the University of Washington, has been involved in an effort to improve mapping of the pedestrian way. By making use of the work from the OpenSidewalks project, they created AccessMap – a trip planning tool for people with limited mobility. With this tool, people can find the…
Gamifying and Crowdsourcing ADA Inspections
The Makeability Lab at the University of Maryland is on a mission to "collect street-level accessibility information from every street in the world and enable design and development of a novel set of location-based technologies for accessibility." In order to achieve this goal, they set up an interactive website where people can inspect, identify, and…
Celebrating 25 Years of ADA
Today marks the 25th anniversay of the signing of the ADA legislation. This milestone is a good time to look around your community and see just how much your governmental agency has accomplished in removing barriers for those who have disabilities. Do you have a transition plan for identifying and removing barriers? When was the…
Federal-aid Essentials Update – ADA Requirements for Resurfacing Projects
See below for a recent Federal-aid Essentials Update from the FHWA. This information will be particularly helpful to local agencies: Are you aware that Federal law requires the installation of curb ramps or other modifications when a highway project alters a roadway? To learn more visit the new information module and watch the short video…
Submit Your Ideas on Transportation & Assistive Devices & Technologies
The U.S. DOT through the FHWA has opened a dialogue on Transportation and Assistive Devices and Technologies. You can visit their Ideascale site to offer your own ideas about how best to make use of technologies to enhance and support mobility for transportation users with disabilities. It's important for all of us in involved in…
Mobile App for ADA Requirements in the Right of Way
Over the last week, we worked on setting up a basic mobile app to display the requirements from the 1991 ADA Law that relate to facilities in the right of way. For the content, we used the requirements and some of the graphics from Chapter 6 of the ADA Toolkit for Local Government. When it was…
3D ADA Toolkit for Local Government in Unity 3D
A couple years ago I put together an unofficial 3D version of the ADA Toolkit for Local Government. It was based in an immersive environment anyone could visit and experience as an avatar or digital representation of themselves. Normally the ADA Toolkit is only available as an online, primarily text-based document. So I figured the ability…
The ADA Toolkit for Local Government in 3D
Most of us working in local government are probably familiar with the ADA Best Practices Toolkit for State and Local Government published online by the U.S. Department of Justice at http://www.ada.gov/pcatoolkit/toolkitmain.htm. The document is well-written and helpful in providing guidance in understanding and complying with regulations related to accessibility. But like most government documents, it is…
A Day in the Life of a Civil Engineer – Day 59
Day 59 Budget Analysis As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had our intern create a spreadsheet so I could track the money that has been spent in the accounts related to my division. Today I started going through that document checking it against invoices and making sure each entry was coded correctly. I…