The NYC Accessibility project encompasses two sets of tools:
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Mine social media for accessibility information: Investigate scraping sites like Yelp, Foursquare, and Twitter for details about accessibility at specific locations and generating automatic readings for a site like AXS Map
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MTA Accessibility: Scrape the output of the MTA regarding the availability and maintentance status of elevators, escalators, and other affordances for those with mobility impairments. Present it in a more usable format. (Start with NYC Subways and Buses EE Outage System.)
Some of the initial motivation for this project came from these news pieces:
- New York City has a great subway if you're not in a wheelchair (NY Times)
- This man's epic quest for a rainbow bagel makes a crucial point about accessibility (Mashable)
- #CripTax: Hidden costs of being disabled (Storify)
The initial work for these projects was done at the first NYC D4D hackathon.
- If you haven't already, read this first
- Join the slack channel #p-nyc-accessibility and introduce yourself. If you need an invite to our slack system, email team@datafordemocracy.org.
- Read our brainstorming document
- Check out our issues page on Github to see if there's something you can contribute to. If you don't see anything or you have questions, ask in the slack channel.
- Fork the repo to your own github account. If you're not familiar with this process, you can find the steps here.