Title: Exploration of Known Group Validity of the AccessPlace Building Accessibility App among People with Disabilities
Name: Kelly McGavock
Primary Presenters: Kelly McGavock, Megan Vosberg
College of Health Sciences
Undergraduate
Faculty Sponsor(s): Dr. Roger O. Smith
Although the Americans with Disabilities Act Accessibility Guidelines (ADAAG) mandate accessibility requirements for public buildings, people with disabilities are still limited from participating within the community. Crowd-sourced review sites like Yelp and Google fail to provide accessibility information. AccessPlace is a web application designed to provide personalized accessibility information of community buildings based on a user’s profile. The purpose of this study is to test the Known-Groups validity of AccessPlace ratings among its users to document the relevancy of personalized reviews. We hypothesize that AccessPlace will validate ratings among users of the same impairment type and discriminate amongst other impairment types. The objective includes determining the Known-Groups validity for the AccessPlace app to identify whether AccessPlace can discriminate ratings among people with motor, cognitive, visual, and hearing impairments using the personalized profiles. Researchers will recruit participants through Milwaukee area disability organizations. The participants will rate two restaurants based on one positive and negative experience. Pre- and post-surveys will be conducted via Qualtrics to determine the usefulness of AccessPlace reviews. Once data collection is finalized, two statistical analyses, Fleiss’ Kappa and Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), will be performed to investigate the agreement among and between varying impairment types. We expect the data to suggest the need to explore ratings among the same impairment groups to validate AccessPlace findings for these populations. If the outcomes of the study are as expected, future implementation of the project includes replication with a larger group of participants to further the evidence surrounding Known-Group validity.