Froehlich, Jon ESaha, Manaswi2022-09-232022-09-232022-09-232022Saha_washington_0250E_24688.pdfhttp://hdl.handle.net/1773/49320Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2022Accessibility of urban infrastructure affects the mobility and safety of people, but disproportionately affects people with mobility disabilities. For example, missing curb ramps and uprooted sidewalks can significantly impact the day-to-day travel and safety of wheelchair users. However, there is an immense lack of comprehensive tools to understand and assess urban accessibility and aid decision-making. In this dissertation, I explore the issue of understanding urban accessibility and designing tools for it, with a specific focus on sidewalk accessibility for people with mobility disabilities. I aim to transform how we collect, quantify, visualize, and communicate urban accessibility data through interactive tools. Towards this goal, I have a two-fold vision: (1) mapping the physical accessibility of the world and (2) empowering people with interactive data-driven tools for daily living and urban-scale decision-making. I take a multi-stakeholder approach and characterize urban accessibility as a three-pronged problem: People, Data, and Tools. To address these problems, this dissertation follows three research threads: (1) Socio-Political Environment Analysis [People problem]: Understanding multi-stakeholder interactions and decision-making in a civic ecosystem that leads to inaccessible infrastructure, (2) Scalable Data Collection [Data problem]: Building scalable approaches to address the lack of comprehensive city-wide accessibility datasets, and (3) Interactive Data-driven Decision-Making Tools [Tools problem]: Designing interactive tools for aiding in-situ and remote accessibility decision-making. Across the threads, I bring multiple perspectives from varied stakeholders and diverse decision-making contexts to inform the design of future tools in this space. Specifically, I study five stakeholder groups, namely, policymakers, department officials, accessibility advocates, people with mobility disabilities, and caregivers. Using qualitative studies, online street view imagery, and techniques from crowdsourcing, visualization, and AI, I develop sets of design guidelines and a suite of interactive tools that enable stakeholders to surface underlying causes of inaccessibility, build and raise awareness, and present relevant information for making decisions across daily living, city planning, political advocacy, and policymaking.application/pdfen-USCC BYcrowdsourcingdecision-makingphysical accessibilitysidewalksurban informaticsvisualizationComputer scienceComputer science and engineeringThesis