Accessibility – Page 6

Accessibility Logo

New International Symbol of Accessibility

One of the most recognized symbols world-wide is the disability symbol, officially called the International Symbol of Access (ISA). The symbol, which features a stick figure in a wheelchair with a blue-and-white color scheme, has been given a make-over for the twenty-first century.

The symbol, designed by Susanne Koefed in 1968 at the request of Rehabilitation International’s International Commission on Technology and Accessibility has been criticized by some as portraying the disabled as limited, passive and helpless. (For a history of the International Symbol of Access, visit, History of the Handicapped Symbol and Rehabilitation International: Symbol of Access.)

The Make-Over

The logo’s new look is the work of a design team at Gordon College in Massachusetts. The team decided to create a logo that aims to change the negative connotations of the original logo. The new design still maintains the traditional blue and white color scheme but shows the stick figure leaning forward and active. Like the traditional logo, the new design has critics as well as fans. Critics say the new symbol has too much emphasis on activeness when the same result could have been achieved a little more subtly.

Rolling Out

The revamped logo has rolled out across accessible entry ramps and entries, parking signs, and bathroom doors. I most recently spotted it in the parking lot of the fitness and health center I frequent, and in the newly paved parking lot of the local community college.

Downloadable Disability Access Symbols

Want to promote and publicize the accessibility of your business or services? The “wheelchair symbol” isn’t the only symbol of access. The Graphic Artists Guild Foundation with support and technical assistance from the Office for Special Constituencies, National Endowment has produced 12 different symbols that indicate the type of access available. The symbols have been designed for use by both public and private entities to advertise available facilities to patrons both disabled or able-bodied.

Free vector downloads of the 12 disability access symbols are available; the Graphic Artists Guild has a complete set of the symbols in TIFF format in a ZIP file at Downloadable Disability Access Symbols.

Read Books Aloud – with Your Finger

A new technology under development by the MIT Fluid Media Lab may soon make it possible for individuals with visual impairments or with other impairments that make it difficult to interact easily with print media, to read print aloud. The “Finger Reader” is a new technology being developed for text-to-speech. It still needs some improvement, but it’s interesting to think about the possibilities this might open up. To learn more, visit:

AXS Map: The That Maps Obstacles for the Disabled

For most people, going shopping, to the movies or meeting friends for dinner at a new restaurant, shouldn’t require too much advanced planning. Just show up and walk in.

For wheelchair users such as Jason DaSilva who lives in New York City, these simple actions harbor hidden obstacles that often make them nearly impossible to perform in a wheelchair. He took these activities for granted the first 25 years of his life.

Frustrated by his inability to move around as freely as he liked, DaSilva developed AXS Map — a crowdsourcing platform that allows people around the world to rate businesses for accessibility and, most important, to share that information.

Although the Americans With Disabilities Act (1990) mandated that buildings and other facilities become more accessible to those with disabilities, DaSilva found significant variability in how well the law was executed. In addition, buildings constructed before 1990 are exempt from the regulations.

Described as “a app that works like Yelp for people with disabilities,” AXS Map isn’t intended to rate the extent to which a structure is ADA-compliant; instead it serves as a tool for people with mobility issues to find out which businesses in their community are actually accessible, and to what degree. AXS Map, like Yelp and other crowdsourcing platforms, will become increasingly more useful as users contribute data. Also like Yelp, with more ratings, the most positive or negative reviews are canceled out so users end up with a solid core of realistic reviews.

The app was launched in 2012 as a website and mobile Web app, and is powered by Google Maps. Users are able to rate several features of local businesses for accessibility, which are tallied into an overall star rating.

Instead of leaving the ratings for AXS Map up to specialists, DaSilva wanted members of the disabled community to inform and empower themselves, with the help of friends, family and neighbors, by pooling their evaluations of how accessible facilities really are. “Opening up the ratings to the community is an attempt to bridge the gap between people living with mobility issues and the larger communities that we live in.”

DaSilva sees the app as his legacy for the disabled community. A documentary filmmaker in New York City, he was diagnosed in 2005, with primary progressive multiple sclerosis, a rare, accelerated form of the neurological disorder.

DaSilva and his wife Alice Cook, whom he met while developing AXS Map, have started hosting Mapping Days across the U.S., bringing together volunteers from the community to map entire neighborhoods in AXS Map. The crowdsourcing has the added benefit of raising awareness around accessibility.

With AXS Map, he hopes to help others like him to live as independently as they can.