This is the text of a talk delivered April 26, 2013 at the Federal University of Rio de janeiro at a conference on disability and mapping sponsored by RehabilitArte.

1. What is a map?
A map is a question together with its answer.
An accurate map answers the question correctly. A useful map asks a question that
interests you. I know of many accurate useless maps.
Why is that so often my experience?
A map intends to tell us where something is in space. It ends up telling us what the
mapmaker is able to perceive in that space. In fact, it limits itself to telling us what the
mapmaker considers to be priority data within what they perceive.
So, you wouldn’t find a street map that indicates that this street corner smells like jasmine
flowers and sounds like a room full of sewing machines.
Why? Because, obviously the mapmaker was not fortunate enough to experience this
space as would someone who is blind. They didn’t realize that – as any blind person
would have perceived – you need to turn left here and go twelve paces to find the door to
your tailor who, by the way, hires seven assistants to sew fashions all day long and has
planter boxes of jasmine outside the open windows on either side of her door.
As a researcher in the area of tourism and disability I start with a fundamental
observation: Disability is not entirely determined by whether I can walk or see or hear.
Disability is a social judgment placed upon those facts about me. A society’s attitude
toward human difference is, speaking metaphorically now, a “map” for how to allocate
resources in relation to human beings.

2. To play with the metaphor, disability is a social construction that places me on the
margins of social participation – at the edges of or outside the map - by undervaluing me
as a human being and as a citizen.
Thus undervalued as a person, I and those like me, are apportioned a smaller piece of our
shared social resources by this prejudiced calculus.

3. So before we even begin to read any specific map we know that a map is most often
somebody else’s questions. It is shaped from somebody else’s perceptions. These may or
may or may not be accurate in fact or relevant to our interests. In fact, what we have
come to call a map may not be capable of expressing the sort of information we need in
order to navigate such as sound or smell.
All the way in the back of the room can you hear Paulo Freire whispering in my ear that
learning to read a map can be as politically liberating as learning to read the alphabet?
I wonder if Paulo would lead us to a question. Is the fact that my people find so many
maps to be useless related to the fact that people with disabilities are not those who
typically make maps? Can we change that?

4. They say that the secret to good research is forming the right question. Let’s play with
Google Maps to see if we can figure out the questions being asked there.
I have chosen five maps centering on Guanabara Bay.
This first map is actually incomplete. It is a map-in-progress. There are two blue balloons
visible here. What question might have been in the mind of the mapmaker that caused
them to put these two marks on the map?
Right, they want to say something about the relationship between these two locations.
The second map shows what? It shows a major automobile route from Rio to Niteroi.
Specifically, it starts at the yacht Club in Botafogo and ends at the yacht club south of
Niteroi.

5. The third map shows a relationship between the Botafogo yacht club and the one in
Niteroi if one travels via public transit.
The fourth is how a sailor might go from one yacht club to another.
Each map requires different information to successfully answer the question it asks.
Take a close look at the fifth map. Do you see that it has the same start and end points?
Yet it shows a path that goes far past Petropolis up toward Juiz de Fora before it comes
back down to Niteroi. Can anyone guess what question Google Maps thinks it is
answering with this map?

6. The map was generated by asking, “How can I walk from Point A to Point B?” The
answer is a 415 kilometer trek that takes an estimated 88 hours!
OK, so now we know that technology itself, Google Maps for example, is not sufficient
to make accurate and useful maps for persons with disabilities.
This neglect has created an opportunity for Eduardo Battiston to win an award from
Google. He will supplement Google’s map of Sao Paulo with Accessibility View.
“Accessibility View,” explain my friends at Universal Design.com, “will provide …
photographs of sidewalks from the perspective of a wheelchair user, allowing viewers to
identify any potential obstacles along the route, like a lack of curb cuts or a hill that is too
steep.”
Eduardo has not yet shown his perspective from a wheelchair view
but here is an example of a free tool that captures existing Google Map data from the
point of view of an automobile.
HyperLapse
http://vimeo.com/63653873
Eduardo is far from the only person trying to resolve this problem of sidewalk navigation.
Several years ago I was visited by two Hungarians who went on to create the mobile
application for self-guided walking tours called Pocket Guide. We worked on learning to
perceive data - how to capture the information necessary to be certain that their walking
tours accommodated people with disabilities.
One academic paper on this subject of sidewalk navigation was recently sent to me by
one of its authors, Benedict Jones.

7. When Benedict heard I would be speaking to you he sent his paper called “Enhancing
Wheelchair Mobility through Capture and Use of Terrain Data.” In the paper the authors
make a start at elaborating protocols for data capture and publication. What I find
particularly relevant is the author’s approach to rating systems for the routes suggested by
an application. This approach corresponds to the consensus reached by those of us who
consult in the field:
Expert opinion based on reliable data should be supplemented by the more democratic
multiple user contributions on the same data and routes. This catches the biases of
experts, the factual errors when inputting or outputting the data, and any changes that
may have occurred since the experts did their measurements.
It also acknowledges that a map is best at representing discrete data points and their
relationships but not the ‘atmosphere’ of a space. For a fascinating application of the
concept of atmospheres I highly recommend the work of my colleagues Regina Cohen,
Cristiane Rose Duarte and Alice Brasileiro in their paper, “Inclusion and Accessibility of
Persons with Disability in Brazil: Senses and Sensations in the Access to Patrimonial
Historical Museums in the State of Rio de Janeiro.”
This robust attention to user experience is fundamental to the design process known as
Universal Design. Universal Design must be the process used to create any reliable map
made for people with disabilities. This is because the map itself must not be seen as
‘special” and thus stigmatizing and because such a map is inevitably also useful to those
without disabilities. The Institute for Human Centered Design defines the concept this
way:
Universal Design is a framework for the design of places, things, information,
communication and policy to be usable by the widest range of people operating in
the widest range of situations without special or separate design. Most simply,
Universal Design is human-centered design of everything with everyone in mind.

8. Universal Design is also called Inclusive Design, Design-for-All and Lifespan
Design. It is not a design style but an orientation to any design process that starts
with a responsibility to the experience of the user.
So far we are mainly talking about gathering data. What about effectively communicating
that data? That exploration tells us that we need to reinvent mapmaking.
I want to start this part of the conversation by emphasizing the contributions of a person
with a disability. He is Dr. Joshua Meile of Berkeley California..
Josh has created what is called a tactile map of the entire San Francisco Bay Area Rapid
Transit system. Its raised lines of plastic are supplemented with Braille labels.
You may have seen this sort of relief map as near as the Jardim Botanico here in
Rio. The innovation he has introduced involves yet one more sense – hearing.
Key points on the map may be touched with an audio smart pen triggering
recorded verbal information.

9. The raised lines on Josh’s transit system map are static and fixed. Another
laboratory is working on what is called a haptic display. Here tiny pins in the
device can be raised and lowered in response to computer commands. You may
have seen a haptic display as a narrow extra keyboard sitting in front of a blind
person’s laptop. Rather than see words on the screen these refreshable Braille
displays pop up pins that can be read as words with the fingers. Haptic displays
under development can be used to make refreshable tactile maps.
Recall the video we saw earlier with Google’s images of roads and Eduardo
Battiston’s idea foe Accessibility View with images of sidewalks Josh worked on the
Descriptive Video Exchange. It is a crowd-sourced image description service that
immediately became popular. It is already being used worldwide to audiodescribe

10. online versions of films. It can be used to audiodescribe any video used in online
maps.
Pietr Human in South Africa has been sharing with me his progress with
accessible maps using a different approach. His map, called InCar, geolocates the
automobile using the system and alerts travelers to upcoming points of interest
like an automated tour guide. The system offers detailed verbal descriptions of
the beauty and history through which one is driving. From the beginning, when
we met in Johannesburg in 2009, Pietr’s central goal has been to make this
product an accessible map. He calls it the “World’s First GPS Tourism Audio
Visual Destination Finder. He explains, “The audio-visual presentations provide
passengers and kids a fun and meaningful “on the road” pastime. For the first
time, people with SPECIAL NEEDS, Paraplegics, Deaf/Hard-of Hearing and the
Blind are being included with accessibility information that matters to them.”
Closer to my home in California, near Apple and Google, Joana Cardosa from Portugal
and her partner Shannon Moore are launching an online environment that will be the
perfect setting for sidewalk visualizations such as Accessibility View. They describe their
project, Effortless City, as a sidewalk navigation system where carefully gathered data
relevant to wheelchair users is presented in visually appealing an user-sensitive ways. In
fact, the site contains an artificial intelligence algorithm that processes data and packages
it into suggestions for accessible routes customized to each user.
Technologies are advancing that allow for the reinvention of maps – texture, sound, static
and moving images can now easily be incorporated in maps. The maps themselves can
know where they are with GPS signals and know who they are talking to with artificial
intelligence algorithms.
Regardless of the inspiring technology maps will continue to represent the perspectives of
mapmakers.
So, as the next generation contribution to accessible maps I suggest something that only
Brazil can do right now. Leverage the 2016 Paralympics. Include a map-reading and
map-literacy project of conscientizacao in the Rio 2016 Games Cultural Olimpiad. I
would be happy to be part of a team that does so.
We can be certain that directories, maps, and awareness campaigns will be launched for
tourists and citizens alike showing the glorious places one can experience in Brazil
before, during, and after Rio 2016.
What if we made a map whose purpose is exactly the opposite? What if we made a map
that highlights everywhere in Rio that simply is not available to the direct experience of
someone in a wheelchair?
It would serve as a public education about the experience of physical exclusion in Rio. It
would also serve the starting point for an action plan for the city to expand its
accessibility.

11. To be trustworthy, relevant, and legible it would need to respect its readers.
It would need to be auditory and tactile for the blind. It would need to be both verbal and
iconic to accommodate those literate in Portuguese and those who are not. It would need
to be visual to accommodate the sighted. It would be literal with image-described photos
and videos for those whose learning style was highly sight-based but still accessible to
those who are not. It would be increasingly abstract using diagrams, sketches, icons, and
spatial relationships for those whose learning style favored the abstract. It would be
timely by indicating where accessibility projects were planned or underway. It would be
starkly barren where physical inaccessibility made spaces unknowable to cadeirantes
through direct experience.
It would be art imitating through a new kind of “map” something of the atmosphere that
exclusion infuses in a place.
Perhaps we could call it a Map of Saudades. It would be an artistic representation of the
sense of the “presence of absence” that people with disabilities sense but do not always
articulate in relation to spaces which they are prohibited from experiencing firsthand.
END
***
Notes:
Definition of Universal Design
http://humancentereddesign.org/universal-design
Pietr Human
http://incar.co.za/
Effortless City
https://www.facebook.com/EffortlessCity
http://effortlesscity.wordpress.com/

12. We want to start from assumptions that are positively biased toward users with
disabilities – mapmaking that is inclusive. We can find clues toward that in the writing of
the Australian quadriplegic professor Simon Darcy. He wrote on how to present
accessibility data to travelers with disabilities. Darcy notes that including photos, videos,
diagrams, and icons supplemented with actual measurements greatly aids the travel
decision-making process for travelers with disabilities. (A METHODOLOGY FOR
TESTING ACCESSIBLE ACCOMMODATIONINFORMATION PROVISION
FORMATS) As we noted so does taking advantage of the democratizing influence of
crowd-sourced ratings.
HyperLapse
http://www.teehanlax.com/labs/hyperlapse/
Pietr Human
http://incar.co.za/

13. Effortless City
https://www.facebook.com/EffortlessCity
http://effortlesscity.wordpress.com/
Napolean Map
http://lindsayrgwatt.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/minard.jpg
http://dougmccune.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/napoleon_pumpkin_1.jpg
http://research.bllly.nl/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/minards-napoleon.png
http://www.wayfind.com/images/napoleonBoykinFull.jpg