The Atlas
Accessibility With Confidence
The Atlas is a community-sourced navigation app that empowers digital citizens with accessibility information to help them access societal spaces. It ensures peace of mind and provides opportunities for equal participation through a crowd-sourced map.
Check Out the closed beta and let your voice be heard.
The problem
In June 2019, The Accessible Canada Act became law. The Act commits to making Canada barrier-free by Jan 2040. That is only 18 years from now! Today’s reality is not barrier free, and one of the biggest issues those who have mobility limitations face day-to-day is changes to their built environment.
Features
Users & Partners
The Atlas supports businesses responsible for public spaces by enabling effective public engagement. Our initial focus is on construction companies. Traditional construction consultation processes tend to only reach people with typical mobility, not those with mobility limitations or those who bicycle, e-scooter, or push strollers.
The Atlas also enhances competitive advantage by helping companies win bids for multimillion dollar projects. With The Atlas, a bidding contractor can demonstrate that they are able to reach a large community of relevant users and that they can respond to accessibility requirements stipulated in the contract. Since users of The Atlas vote on existing barriers in real-time, this information can be shared with businesses and municipalities so they can expedite barrier removal.
Secondary customers are already emerging. Mass transit operators often experience elevator outages, escalators down for cleaning, and poor access to platforms or bus stops. Other customers include campuses, shopping malls and convention centres, where dynamic changes in routes and access points are common and two-way communication could be immensely valuable.
If you’re interested in partnering to make the world a more accessible place for all, contact us here.
Outdoor Mapping
Construction Companies
Construction projects are necessary to build critical infrastructure, but they create massive barriers for people with mobility limitations. Although efforts are made to ensure wayfinding paths through and around the construction site, they may not be sufficient for somebody in a wheelchair or with a walker. The Edmonton Journal published an article describing the issue from the perspective of cyclists and pedestrians, but the issue extends to scooter riders and is exacerbated for people with mobility limitations.
The Atlas addresses this issue by working with construction companies to ease the communication of wayfinding around construction projects through mobile devices. Barriers and paths can be readily communicated to pedestrians who can also instantly communicate new barriers back to the construction managers. Data can be collected through the user base on how pedestrians are navigating the construction site and which barriers are most affecting travel.
Through the presentation and transmission of accessibility data between managers and pedestrians, The Atlas makes construction sites - and the whole city - more accessible to all.
Indoor Mapping
University of Alberta Library
In 2022, Click&Push Accessibility partnered with the University of Alberta Libraries to map the Cameron Library at North Campus. The project allowed us to standardize our mapping process and streamline for efficiency.
The Atlas now shows specific indoor wayfinding and accessibility information on building floor maps, and it allows clients to readily add curated barrier information to the floor maps while automatically notifying library personnel of that accessibility issue.