Personalized Accessibility Maps (PAMs) for communities with special needs

Accessibility data/information is necessary to support the everyday mobility of people with special needs. As a means to accommodate mobility of students with special needs, universities and colleges provide maps with accessibility data/information for their campus, where some are static and others are interactive. In this paper, we describe the concept of Personalized Accessibility Maps (PAMs) and discuss the development of a PAM for the University of Pittsburgh's main campus as a representative PAM. As a result of this development, there is a better understanding of the technologies and techniques needed for PAMs along with challenges and future research directions. © 2013 Springer-Verlag