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From
Time magazine:
A filmmaker with multiple sclerosis hopes an app he developed will help fellow wheelchair users make cities like New York more accessible.
For most people, meeting friends for dinner at a new restaurant,
jumping into a taxi or going out for a shopping trip shouldn’t require
too much advanced planning. Just show up and walk in.
But as Jason DaSilva discovered, these simple actions that he took
for granted for the first 25 years of his life harbored hidden obstacles
that made them nearly impossible to perform in a wheelchair.
Steps, narrow doorways, cracked sidewalks and impossibly long ramps
were only some of the barriers he encountered as he tried to navigate New York City,
where he lives, from a chair. Most of the subway system is out of
reach, since not all stations have elevators. And not all taxis are
equipped to load wheelchairs either.
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. Because while the Americans With
Disabilities Act (ADA), enacted by Congress
in 1990, mandated that buildings and other facilities become more
accessible to those with disabilities, DaSilva found huge variability in
how well the law was executed. Beyond that, many buildings constructed
before 1990 are exempt from the regulations. AXS Map isn’t intended to
rate the extent to which a structure is ADA-compliant; it simply serves
as a tool for people with mobility issues to find out which businesses
in their community are actually accessible, and to what degree.
Launched in 2012 as a website and mobile Web app,
AXS Map is powered by Google Maps. Both of the current iterations allow
the user to rate several features of local businesses for
accessibility, which are tallied into an overall star rating. Much like
Yelp and other crowdsourcing platforms, the more data that users
contribute, the more useful the app will become. 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.
“I think it’s critically important that people like Jason are getting
involved and creating change in their own right. It is the only way
that this effort will be successful,” says Mark Perriello, president and
CEO of the American Association of People With Disabilities. “You see a
lot of innovation by people with disabilities … but the number of
people who are participating and changing the future, changing their own
future by changing society, is far too few.”
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. “I found that
there was a lack of awareness in general around accessibility,” he
says. “People without disabilities don’t realize all the challenges that
we face, like is a restroom accessible, is there one small step outside
a restaurant that would keep us from being able to get in? It kind of
blows their minds when they start to realize all these little details.
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.”
Failure to adhere to ADA regulations can result in government
injunctions, steep civil penalties and lawsuits. But while thorough, the
law is complex and often difficult to apply in practice, resulting in
the patchwork level of accessibility that DaSilva encountered.
Initially, the Department of Justice offered free written advice to
business owners who had questions about applying the law, but those
letters ended in the mid-’90s. Since then, businesses rely on ADA
consultants or lawyers, whose help can be costly, or free ADA-consulting
services, which can be difficult to find. Building inspectors are
tasked with making sure that state and local codes are followed, and
states can request federal certification from the Department of Justice
that these codes adhere to or exceed the requirements of ADA. But as
DaSilva and others affected by disabilities have found, there can be
variation in the extent to which these codes actually address
accessibility. For example, the degree of steepness and length of a ramp
can render it too challenging for someone in a manual wheelchair; a
fraction of an inch on a door frame can make it too narrow for some
chairs.
And when it comes to older structures, which are more common in
cities in like New York, for example, the issues become even more
challenging. “Those facilities have an obligation to remove barriers to
the extent that the removal is readily achievable, and that is a
multifactor analysis that takes into account the cost of the removal,
the difficulty, the resources of the business and a host of other
factors,” says Minh Vu, a partner at the legal firm Seyfarth Shaw and
leader of its ADA Title III Specialty Practice Team. Additionally, as
with any piece of legislation, enforcement is also a major issue.
For DaSilva, the app is his legacy for the disabled community. A
documentary filmmaker in New York City, he was diagnosed with primary
progressive multiple sclerosis, a rare, accelerated form of the
neurological disorder, after he noticed that his walk began to change in
2005. With AXS Map, he hopes to help others like him to live as
independently as they can. DaSilva and his wife Alice Cook, whom he met
while developing the product, have started hosting Mapping Days across
the U.S., bringing together volunteers from the community to map entire
neighborhoods in AXS Map. And at the same time, they are raising
awareness around accessibility. “The work I do, this app and the film,
is about changing the face of disability. The civil rights movement, the
gay and lesbian movement, even the feminist movement all gained
traction. But for some reason, the disability movement kind of slowed
down,” says DaSilva. “I’m trying to find a way to bring it back.”
Jason DaSilva’s documentary film, When I Walk, opens theatrically in New York City at IFC Center on Oct. 25 and in Los Angeles on Nov. 1.
