ZuReach (short for “Zurich Urban Reachability & Accessibility Enhancement Through Digital Technology”) is a participatory research project that aims to improve accessibility in the city of Zurich, especially for people with mobility restrictions, through crowdsourcing. It builds on the earlier ZuriACT (Zurich Accessible City) project that enriched data on sidewalk acessibility for district 1 of the city. ZuReach’s goal is to build a collection of comprehensive sidewalk accessibility data in Zurich by involving citizens in the process of data collection.
Now, the ZuReach project, together with Project Sidewalk, iNovitas and the City of Zurich launches a new web application for urban accessibility data collection. The application allows citizens to contribute to the mapping of urban accessibility features, such as pavement surface issues, marked crosswalks, pedestrian signals, obstacles, curb ramps, and more, by providing an easy-to-use interface for data submission. High-resolution street view imagery by iNovitas is incorporated into the application, allowing users to virtually explore the city and identify accessibility issues.
Currently, the team is seeking support from volunteers to scale accessibility data collection citywide in Zurich and also in Winterthur. Besides data collection, the team also is also looking for participants for formative research, including interviews, focus groups, and surveys). More information can be found in this announcement on LinkedIn, in the call for participants, or directly in the registration form.
ZuReach is funded by the Digitalization Initiative of the Zurich Higher Education Institutions (DIZH) and led by the Digital Society Initiative at the University of Zurich, in collaboration with the City of Zurich, the Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW), the UZH Healthy Longevity Center, and other partners.
The Project Sidewalk software is open source under the MIT License. The repository’s “getting started” guide also lists some more Project sidewalk deployments in the USA, Canada, the Netherlands, Mexico, and Taiwan.