Explorations Into Ict Usage And Behavior In Travel Related Activities Of Wheelchair Users

People with limited mobility have to tackle the barriers of built environment and inaccessible services while traveling on an everyday basis. In this paper, we focus on how information and communication technologies are used in the context of traveling in an urban environment. We conducted seven semi-structured interviews with wheelchairs users of various abilities. Our findings suggest that wheelchair users are active in traveling and information and communication technologies focused on route planning (namely satellite imagery and Google Street View) are helpful. Up-to-dateness of the data is an issue. However, wheelchair users do not participate in crowdsourcing activities. From their reactions, it seems that there is a time barrier or they do not see clear benefits from participating. The future design processes should include participatory design approach for industrial designers involved in future accessible navigation user interfaces. Further, ad-hoc change of the route and better communications of municipalities about temporal barriers should be supported.