Project Sidewalk is an online crowdsourcing game that lets anyone with an internet connection use Google Street View to virtually explore neighborhoods and label curb ramps, missing or rough sidewalks, obstacles and more. (University of Washington)
Researchers from the University of Washington have created a game that aims to make all cities more accessible.
Project Sidewalk is an online crowdsourcing game where the player explores the accessibility in a city while labeling accessibility issues. Players use Google Maps to travel around their neighborhood while noting the absence of curb ramps, missing or rough sidewalks, obstacles and anything else that causes accessibility issues.
Before creating the app, the team interviewed people with mobility impairments to learn about accessibility issues in the U.S. Based on these interviews, the team decided the best way to tackle accessibility issues would be through crowdsourcing. Crowdsourcing allows the researchers to gather street-level data about accessibility in an area without having to visit the area.
The team needed to make the app fun so people would want to spend time logging. They decided that a video game model was the best choice. In the game, players go on solo missions where they remotely audit 500-1000 ft of a city at a time. The player is dropped in an area of a city that has not been labeled or that is incompletely labeled. Players can also choose to go to a specific part of the city. A progress bar displayed at the top of the page makes the interface feel more like a game instead of a task and encourages the player to continue labeling.
The app guides the player's first mission so they clearly understand how to walk around and label things. The guide helps the user understand what accessibility is, why it is important and why it needs to be improved everywhere. For a player's first few missions, the game prompts them with tips and shortcuts about the interface to help them label faster.
The game was first launched in Washington D.C. in August 2016. During the first 18 months of Project Sidewalk's launch, 797 players added 205,385 labels. These players were accurate 72% of the time and they were most likely to label and find curb ramps. The game is now available in Newberg, OR and Seattle, WA.
A paper on Project Sidewalk was published in Proceedings of the 2019 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
