Inspiration
Around the world, nearly 40% of physical entities are inaccessible to students with disabilities -- this greatly threatens their lifestyle and independency. Hence, I wanted to create an application that would empower students with disabilities and assist them in their day-to-day life - this is where MapAbility was born.
Features + What MapAbility Does
MapAbility is a web application fostering dialogue and action on inaccessible locations, thus promoting social change and empowering students w/ disabilities. In other words, it allows people to report and discuss inaccessible locations, upon which local authorities can take action and resolve the inaccessibility. This greatly assists and empowers students with disabilities as the accessibility issues that inhibit their independence and lifestyle are now being preemptively resolved through MapAbility.
Challenges Encountered
One of the biggest challenges we ran into was ensuring the proper implementation of a location-based service -- using a geolocation API, MapAbility was able to address this issue.
In addition, we wanted to find a way to allow for people to report the accessibility of roads and sidewalks, which students with disabilities often use. Our initial approach didn't allow for this but we soon added a new feature (seen in the video) which allows for this!
Next Steps
We'd like to soon add additional features to MapAbility (for example, allowing for more custom inputs and faster input and output returns) - recieving recognition at SET.Hacks() 2021 would certainly provide us with the traction and early energy to make this a reality.
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