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Maps for Easy Paths (MEP): A Mobile Application for City Accessibility

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Mobile Solutions and Their Usefulness in Everyday Life

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Abstract

Maps for Easy Paths (MEP) project aims to improve accessibility of our cities, by collecting data of urban barriers and accessible paths using mobile devices. Its focus is on users with motor impairments; however, the application design takes into account also some characteristics of other kinds of disabilities. In this chapter, we describe the MEP project in general and present our mobile applications and their design to meet the requirements of usability, accessibility, and usefulness. In particular, we report our usability–accessibility evaluation done both with automatic tools and with manual/visual analysis and describe the experience in using it in different cities and in campaigns with middle and high school students, to understand the perceived usefulness and its ease of use.

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Acknowledgments

This research has been funded by Polisocial Award, Politecnico di Milano, Italy. We wish to thank the whole MEP team, the schools that participated in the campaigns, and the MEP users.

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Correspondence to S. Comai .

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Comai, S., De Bernardi, E., Salice, F., Vali, A. (2019). Maps for Easy Paths (MEP): A Mobile Application for City Accessibility. In: Paiva, S. (eds) Mobile Solutions and Their Usefulness in Everyday Life. EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93491-4_6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-93491-4_6

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