October 10, 2014
Students win award to make riding the bus more accessible for blind people
StopInfo shows details about a bus stop in the OneBusAway app.U of Washington
A group of University of Washington engineering students are winners of the 2014 Ford College Community Challenge, a competition that awards $25,000 per team to student-led groups at 10 universities to fund projects that help build sustainable communities.
The UW team’s project is StopInfo, which integrates with the OneBusAway app and provides specific information on location, safety features and stop closures for each bus stop in King County. OneBusAway was developed at the UW and uses real-time data to track when your bus is actually going to arrive.
The UW computer science and engineering team – Cynthia Bennett, Caitlin Bonnar, Megan Campbell and faculty adviser Alan Borning – is using the funding to continue developing StopInfo as an accessibility tool for blind and low-vision bus riders. They are interviewing people who could help make it better, including bus drivers, orientation and mobility instructors and blind users after they ran an initial study showing the program helps support independent and safe travel by blind riders.
The students hope more riders will enter information for the bus stops they use regularly. The program improves as more users populate it with information. It is currently available on the iPhone OneBusAway app and the team hopes to expand it to the other OneBusAway apps in the future.
To use StopInfo on an iPhone, press the “?” logo when you are looking at arrival information for a particular stop.
The yearly competition is put on by Ford Motor Co.
