Accessibility Cyberscapes and the Digital Divide

In this paper, we discuss early findings on a study of user generated accessibility information. We utilize data from OpenStreetMap that include tags related to wheelchair accessibility and compare the distribution of these data to other explanatory data collected in the American Community Survey. We perform a linear regression and find that the population of people with disabilities in an area had a stronger relationship with the frequency of data points than household income or the urban status. Future work includes analyzing the accessibility data within the context of other data found in OpenStreetMap, and the use of additional measures associated with the digital divide such as level of education or the number of available access points.