Inspiration Behind Project
For the past couple of months, students with disabilities have been recieving virtual instruction which minimizes concerns regarding accessibility. However, with schools reopening, students with disabilities will have challenges recieving in-person instruction and it's of paremount importance that these sttrucural concerns be resolved.
In addition, around the world, nearly 40% of physical entities are inaccessible to students with disabilities -- this greatly threatens the quality of in-person instruction. Hence, we wanted to create an application that would help students with disabilities transition from virtual to in-person learning by removing the accessbility challenges they would encounter through in-person learning.
Features + What MapAbility Does
MapAbility is a web application fostering dialogue and action on inaccessible locations, thus enhancing the accessibility of in-person instruction for students w/ disabilities and easing the transition for them. 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 students with disabilities as these accessibility issues will inhibit the quality of their in-person instruction, but with MapAbility, these issues can be preemptively resolved.
Creation of MapAbility
MapAbility was built with HTML, HTML5, CSS, CSS3, JavaScript, Java, Atom, Notepad++, and a variety of other tools.
Effect on Students Returning To In-Person School + Connection to Theme
MapAbility is in close alignment to NightCode's theme. Currently, students with disabilities, like many other students, receive virtual instruction - this greatly minimizes the need for locations to be accessible to them as they don't have to travel to any locations besides their homes. However, when students return to in-person school, many more accessibility concerns are raised - for example, sidewalks to their bus stop must be accessible, the bus must be accessible, and the school (and classrooms) must be accessible.
With MapAbility, students and their parents are able to report the accessibility of these locations, and before students with disabilities actually return to school, these issues can be resolved. Thus, it's clear - MapAbility, in allowing parents and students to report inaccessible locations, eases and aids students with disabilities in returning to in-person school.
MapAbility is thus in very close alignment to NightCode's theme. We help solve the accessibility issues that will become more prevalent again and help students with disabilities in transitioning from virtual education to in-person education.
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 sidewaks, which students with disabilities often use. Our intitial approach didn't allow for this but we soon added a new feature (seen in the vide) which allows for this!
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