The paper “Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View” has received the Best Paper Award at the 2013 ASSETS conference – the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Accessible Computing.
Among the authors: Shiri Azenkot and Megan Campbell are UW graduate students. Kelly Minckler and Rochelle Ng are UW undergraduates. Cynthia Bennett is a staff research assistant working with Professor Richard Ladner. Jon Froehlich is a former Ph.D. student at UW, now an Assistant Professor at the University of Maryland. Groups at the University of Washington and University of Maryland were working on similar projects using crowdsourcing with Google Street View to identify physical landmarks at bus stop locations that would be useful for blind bus riders. They combined forces to study areas of Seattle and Washington DC in several interesting studies.
UW researchers also received the Best Paper award at ASSETS 2012.