Accessibility plays an important role in a number of scientific fields, and significant advances in measuring accessibility have been made over the past two decades. However, since the comprehensive review of accessibility measures conducted by Geurs and van Wee in 2004, no attempt has been made to update their study. In addition, the emergence of Automated Vehicles (AVs) is expected to dramatically impact accessibility. Therefore, based on the relevant assessment criteria proposed by Geurs and van Wee (2004) (i.e., theoretical basis, interpretability, operationalization, and usability), this research reviews: (1) progress made over the past two decades on measuring accessibility; and (2) how accessibility measures have incorporated the impacts of AVs. A total of 495 papers and books were identified through a search of Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCOhost in May 2019. The results found that the existing accessibility measures have been further refined, and new measures have been created by leveraging more advanced behavior theories and/or models. In addition, the operationalization of almost all of the measures has become easier due to more readily available data and more advanced implementation tools. As a result of these changes, accessibility measures are becoming more usable and can more accurately assess social, economic, and environmental impacts. However, the interpretation of these measures is becoming more difficult due to the incorporation of more complicated theories and models. Interestingly, very few papers discussed AVs in the context of accessibility measures. Finally, as a result of this study, future research opportunities are identified. / Master of Urban and Regional Planning / The concept of accessibility plays an important role in a number of scientific fields (e.g., transportation planning, environmental conservation, and economic development, etc.), and a change in accessibility can have a direct impact on an individual's quality of life. Transportation accessibility is a function of the connectivity between origins (e.g., a home) and destinations (e.g., a place of employment). Significant advances in measuring accessibility have been made over the past two decades. However, since the comprehensive review of accessibility measures conducted by Geurs and van Wee in 2004, no attempt has been made to update their study. In addition, the emergence of Automated Vehicles (AVs) is expected to dramatically impact accessibility. Therefore, based on the relevant assessment criteria proposed by Geurs and van Wee (2004) (i.e., theoretical basis, interpretability, operationalization, and usability), this research reviews: (1) progress made over the past two decades on measuring accessibility; and (2) how accessibility measures have incorporated the impacts of AVs. The theoretical basis refers to whether an accessibility measure is developed based on solid theories or models, and whether the measure is sensitive to: (a) opportunity changes (e.g., changes in the location of jobs); (b) transport cost changes (e.g., travel time changes); (c) temporal changes (e.g., the change of travel options throughout different times-of-day); and (d) individual changes (e.g., how residents' travel behavior changes due to the emergence of a new subway line). Interpretability refers to how easy an accessibility measure can be explained and understood by planners, engineers, and decision makers. Operationalization refers to how easy it is to use a measure in practice. Finally, usability refers to whether the results of an accessibility measure can be used to assess social, economic, and environmental impacts. A total of 495 papers and books were identified through a search of Scopus, Web of Science, and EBSCOhost in May 2019. The results found that existing accessibility measures have been further refined, and new measures have been created by leveraging more advanced behavior theories and/or models. In addition, the operationalization of almost all of the measures has become easier due to more readily available data and more advanced implementation tools. As a result of these changes, accessibility measures are becoming more usable and can more accurately assess social, economic, and environmental impacts. However, the interpretation of these measures is becoming more difficult due to the incorporation of more complicated theories and models. Interestingly, very few papers discussed AVs in the context of accessibility measures. Finally, as a result of this study, future research opportunities are identified.

Från en tidigare studie angående tillgängligheten vid Högskolan i Gävle för personermed rörelsehinder rekommenderades det att en liknande studie för personer med nedsattorienteringsförmåga borde göras. Syftet med denna studie är att undersöka omHögskolan i Gävles entréer är tillgänglighetsanpassade för personer med nedsattorienteringsförmåga. Inventeringen grundas från BBR:s kapitel om tillgänglighet ochdess allmänna råd. I studien inventeras tolv utvalda entréer på Högskolan i Gävle.Studien presenterar även ändringsförslag i form av ritningar för att visa hur entréernakan bli tillgänglighetsanpassade samt en kostnadskalkyl för ändringarna angående deutvalda entréerna. För att få en helhetsbild över problemen utfördes det även enlaboration samt en intervju med Gävle kommuns tillgänglighetssamordnare. Resultatetav studien visade att Högskolan i Gävles entréer har brister i tillgängligheten förpersoner med nedsatt orienteringsförmåga. Ett stort problem som upptäcktes varavsaknaden av skyltar vilket försvårar orienteringen på Högskolan i Gävles område. Detpåvisades även att kontrastmarkeringarna för skolans entréer var slitna, liksombristfällig belysning. Resultaten visar att Högskolan i Gävle behöver vissaförbättringsåtgärder för att få skolan tillgänglig för alla. Avgränsningar som gjorts istudien är att det är enbart de tolv största entréerna på skolan som undersökts och attsvårigheten att hitta testpersoner till laborationen medförde att den fick utföras av osssjälva. / From a former study, regarding the accessibility for persons with reduced mobility, itwas recommended that a similar study regarding the accessibility for persons withorientation disabilities should take place. The aim of this study is to investigate if theentrances of the University of Gävle are accessible for persons with orientationdisabilities. The inventory of the study is based on BBR’s accessibility chapter and itscommon advice. In the study, twelve of the entrances at the University of Gävle wereexamined. The study also presents proposals to change the entrances in form of floorplans to illustrate how to make them accessible. The study also includes an estimatedcost for the whole change. In the study, a laboratory and an interview with theaccessibility coordinator of the Community of Gävle also occur. The result of the studyshowed that the entrances of the University of Gävle have flaws with the accessibilityfor persons with orientation disabilities. One of the main problems that was discoveredwas the lack of signs which makes the orientation more difficult. Another problem thatwas discovered was the condition of the contrast markings. They were all worn. It wasalso observed that the lightning of the building was inadequate. The results show thatthe University of Gävle has some improvements to do, to get the school accessible foreveryone. Delimitations that have been done to this study is that there are only thetwelve main entrances that have been examined. It was also difficult to find test personswith orientation disabilities to the experiment. Therefore, we performed the experiment.

The main purpose of this thesis is introducing and proposing perceived accessibility as an important and so far overseen complement to conventional, objective accessibility in sustainable transport. Perceived accessibility is defined as the possibilities and ease of engaging in preferred activities using different transport modes. Implications for sustainable transport planning along with possible social outcomes related to perceived accessibility are also discussed.   The thesis comprises two empirical studies. In Study I a psychometric measure (PAC) that captures perceived accessibility was developed and validated in three different datasets by exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. All data was collected in Karlstad, Sweden in 2013 and 2014 with a total of 750 participants (bus travelers). Perceived accessibility is suggested as a complement to objective accessibility by contributing with the traveler perspective.  Study II aimed at examining determinants of perceived accessibility focusing on service quality aspects, feelings of safety, age, and trip frequency. Study II used the same data as Study I in a conditional process model to look at the relations between perceived accessibility and its proposed determinants. Service quality and feelings of safety were found important predictors of perceived accessibility, and safety also explains part of the effect of quality on perceived accessibility. These relationships were not dependent on trip frequency (as in how often one travels by public transport). Age also predicted perceived accessibility, and a follow-up cluster analysis showed that elderly and people in their thirties experience significantly lower perceived accessibility than other age groups. / Denna licentiatuppsats behandlar upplevd tillgänglighet, det vill säga resenärsperspektivet på tillgänglighet, som ett viktigt komplement till konventionell (objektiv) tillgänglighet inom hållbart resande. Uppsatsen introducerar upplevd tillgänglighet och dess nytta och plats i forskningen samt implikationer för planering och utvärdering av hållbara transporter. Vidare behandlas påverkansfaktorer för upplevd tillgänglighet samt relaterade individuella utfall som subjektivt välbefinnande och social exkludering/inkludering utifrån teori och empiri.   Uppsatsen innefattar två empiriska studier. Studie I utvecklar och testar ett psykometriskt mätinstrument för upplevd tillgänglighet med data från tre enkät-tillfällen (n= 750) i Karlstad. Dataset 1 analyserades med explorativ faktoranalys för att få fram ett instrument som fångar upplevd tillgänglighet (PAC) och validerades därefter i två dataset. Studie II avsåg att undersöka vad som bidrar till upplevd tillgänglighet med fokus på kvalitetsattribut i resan (service quality), resenärens upplevda trygghet, samt ålder och resvana. Samma data som i studie I användes i en conditional process model för att undersöka sambanden, samt i en klusteranalys för att ytterligare undersöka skillnader i resultatet mellan olika grupper av resenärer. Resultatet visar att upplevd tillgänglighet kan ha betydelse som komplement till befintliga mätningar och utvärderingar av tillgänglighet genom att bidra med resenärsperspektivet. Ett antal påverkansfaktorer för upplevd tillgänglighet kan konstateras, däribland kvalitet samt resenärens upplevda känsla av trygghet. Betydelsen av kvalitet för tillgänglighet är densamma oavsett hur ofta man reser, däremot upplever de som reser ofta en signifikant högre tillgänglighet än de som reser sällan. Äldre resenärer och resenärer i 30-årsåldern påvisar signifikant lägre upplevd tillgänglighet. / This thesis proposes perceived accessibility as a complement to conventional accessibility in sustainable transport planning and evaluation. Perceived accessibility is defined as the possibilities and ease of engaging in preferred activities using different transport modes and captures the traveller experience and perspective of accessibility. The thesis introduces an instrument for measuring perceived accessibility (PAC) along with determinants for perceived accessibility, such as feelings of safety, age, and perceived quality. Related social outcomes such as social inclusion and subjective well-being are discussed, along with possible implications for transport planning and suggestions for future research.

Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 47-06, page: 3543. Adviser: Patrice Vaeth. Includes bibliographical references.

Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 47-06, page: 3554. Adviser: Thomas Giordano. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.P.H.)--University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, School of Public Health, 2007. / Source: Masters Abstracts International, Volume: 45-06, page: 3147. Adviser: Gene Schroder. Includes bibliographical references.

People with Autism Spectrum Disorder experience difficulties with reading comprehension and information processing, which affect their school performance, employability and social inclusion. The main goal of this work is to investigate new ways to evaluate and improve text and web accessibility for adults with autism. The first stage of this research involved using eye-tracking technology and comprehension testing to collect data from a group of participants with autism and a control group of participants without autism. This series of studies resulted in the development of the ASD corpus, which is the first multimodal corpus of text and gaze data obtained from participants with and without autism. We modelled text complexity and sentence complexity using sets of features matched to the reading difficulties people with autism experience. For document-level classification we trained a readability classifier on a generic corpus with known readability levels (easy, medium and difficult) and then used the ASD corpus to evaluate with unseen user-assessed data. For sentence-level classification, we used for the first time gaze data and comprehension testing to define a gold standard of easy and difficult sentences, which we then used as training and evaluation sets for sentence-level classification. The results showed that both classifiers outperformed other measures of complexity and were more accurate predictors of the comprehension of people with autism. We conducted a series of experiments evaluating easy-to-read documents for people with cognitive disabilities. Easy-to-read documents are written in an accessible way, following specific writing guidelines and containing both text and images. We focused mainly on the image component of these documents, a topic which has been significantly under-studied compared to the text component; we were also motivated by the fact that people with autism are very strong visual thinkers and that therefore image insertion could be a way to use their strengths in visual thinking to compensate for their difficulties in reading. We investigated the effects images in text have on attention, comprehension, memorisation and user preferences in people with autism (all of these phenomena were investigated both objectively and subjectively). The results of these experiments were synthesised in a set of guidelines for improving text accessibility for people with autism. Finally, we evaluated the accessibility of web pages with different levels of visual complexity. We provide evidence of existing barriers to finding relevant information on web pages that people with autism face and we explore their subjective experiences with searching the web through survey questions.

The main aim of this paper is to propose a methodology for implementation of spatial interaction models in the GIS environment. This methodology is then verified by creating functional tool for calculating potential accessibility model. The first part summarizes the available literature about those issues. The second part presents the source data and analysis methodology. ESRI ArcGIS and Python are main technologies used. Subsequently, a description of creation tool itself. In conclusion the test analyses and results are described and discussed. Powered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

En pågående digitalisering av det svenska samhället gör att tillgänglighet inte längre är ett enbart fysiskt fenomen utan också ett digitalt. Allt fler av samhällets viktiga tjänster, såsom hälsovård och banktjänster, går över helt eller till stor del till den digitala världen. I och med den ökande närvaron av digitala lösningar finns ett ökande behov av kunskap inom webbtillgänglighet. Syftet för uppsatsen är att på uppdrag av informatikgruppen vid Karlstads universitet undersöka hur en universitetskurs om webbtillgänglighet kan utformas på B-nivå(G1F). Uppsatsförfattarens huvudsakliga fokus har varit de arbetssätt som kan vara av vikt när man lär ut en kurs i webbtillgänglighet och att utforma, följa och utvärdera en workshop där studenter får bekanta sig med de problem som en användare med synnedsättning kan uppleva på webben. Undersökningsfrågorna evaluerades genom observation av föreläsningar och workshops under pilotkursen Framtida Webbstandarder som uppsatsförfattaren tillsammans med en annan uppsatsstudent hjälpt till att formge. Utöver observationerna gjordes en intervju med undervisande lärare och en webenkät skickades ut till studenterna där de gavs möjlighet att yttra sina åsikter om kursen. Efter analys av insamlade data kan det konstateras att en kurs inom webbtillgänglighet kan gynnas av att ha en blandning av teoretiska och praktiska moment för att lära ut det aktuella materialet och att studenter kan engageras i ämnet genom diskussionsuppgifter under föreläsningarna. Den analyserade data visar också på att man kan bygga upp en workshop på sådant sätt att studenterna får testa på olika nivåer av assisterande teknik för synnedsättningar och på så sätt ge dem en övergripande erfarenhet och förståelse för de problem som personer med synnedsättning kan uppleva på webben.

Users with different types of handicaps access web pages with wide scale of device. Thus, it is often difficult to develop web sites in order to be accessible for everyone. This thesis takes into consideration specific guidelines for accessible content of web pages as well as formalization of their rules and subsequent validation of these rules.