AccessMap

Team Name

AccessMap

Team Members

Project Description

According to the 2013 New Zealand Disability Survey, approximately 880,000 New Zealanders live with physical impairments, which is 64 percent of the wider disabled population of 1.1 million. In line with other developed nations, NZ also expects to see an increase in their already aging population, or those who are over the age of 65. This emphasises the need for solutions that will help a large proportion of our current and future population to access everyday places in NZ and participate fully in all aspects of society as part of the Humans Right Act and the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act.

Accessibility is not just about the number of wheelchair ramps and mobility-friendly public toilets, it also about the perception of safety and the physical ability to get around and reach a desired location. AccessMap is an innovative mobile and web-based application that allows all New Zealanders living with a disability to get around and explore NZ safely and easily. Rather than having to think three steps ahead before any outing, New Zealanders living with a disability can now pull out AccessMap on their preferred device, choose a specific location in NZ they want to get to, and select the types of facilities they may need to access and consider before they leave their homes.

Through AccessMap, users will now be able to access a range of datasets from the government, Auckland Transport, and Google Maps to name a few, that can be personalised to their needs in regard to accessibility. We believe that AccessMap has huge potential and could be the starting point to an all inclusive and accessible NZ. Through our prototype of AccessMap, we also hope to encourage the NZ government and private companies to create and publish more relevant datasets that address accessibility.

Data Story

We are passionate about accessibility and wanted to address it at GovHack this year. However, after looking through the list of open government datasets on Friday evening, we realised that there were virtually no datasets that directly addressed barriers to accessibility. We also discovered that there was a discrepancy between sources like Auckland Transport and Google Maps in regard to the number of accessible facilities in a specific area. This motivated us to utilise valuable information from a range of government and public sources in order to create our own datasets and populate AccessMap.