Megan Sullivan and Brooke Follansbee, “Preliminary Construct Validity of the AccessTools Public Building Assessment for People with Disabilities”
Mentor: Roger Smith, Occupational Science & Technology
The AccessTools mobile app generates comprehensive information about building accessibility. This app, being developed by the Rehabilitation Research Design and Disability (R2D2) Center at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is intended to be used by trained raters with a high degree of building accessibility knowledge to comprehensively assess the accessibility of community buildings. To date, however, it has not been documented how relevant the assessment and its information are for people with disabilities. This preliminary validity study begins to validate the AccessTools taxonomy of questions regarding its relevance to people of four different disability types: hearing, vision, mobility, and cognitive. Two primary instruments are being used for data collection: Qualtrics survey software and the AccessTools mobile application. Three participants of each disability type will be recruited from local disability organizations for a total of twelve participants. Participants first complete a pre-survey to gather demographic data and ensure eligibility. Upon completion of the first survey, participants follow instructions to download the AccessTools mobile app. They rate each question as “Not Applicable”, “Somewhat Applicable”, or “Applicable” based on how relevant that question is to them given their impairment. Once all the questions have been assessed, participants complete a post-survey to report the time spent reviewing questions and any additional comments or concerns. Researchers will then compare the assessments of expert raters with the assessments of participants with disabilities. This will identify how well the experts’ generic ratings match actual individual raters with disabilities. Researchers expect to determine which AccessTools questions are most relevant to specific individuals based on their impairment. This study will contribute to the construct validation of AccessTools. Additionally, if the expected correlation between experts and participants with disabilities is high, it will provide evidence for including a personalization scheme for AccessTools reports and for related building accessibility rating systems.
Click the thumbnail below to open the full sized poster in a new tab.
Really interesting, Brooke and Megan! I think this work has the potential to be extremely impactful as well. What I really like about your work is that AccessTools itself is improving accessibility by providing an easy-to-use and widely available app. I’d love to know more about how you see this kind of data being used in the future. I know the intent is that it is obtained by trained raters, but do you foresee a situation in the future where this kind of technology is used by average patrons and individuals to inform the design and development of buildings, infrastructure, etc.?
Hi Josh,
First, thank you so much for checking out our poster! I think this app definitely has the potential to be able to inform professionals on accessibility and how to build an accessible building and environment! We also have an app called AccessPlace which is similar to AccessTools, however, this app is made to be used by everyone. We may use the data to provide more information on AccessPlace as well. This data may also help us improve the app and/or questions in the app, by applying suggestions made from participants in this study.
We appreciate you taking the time to look at our poster! Have a great rest of your day Josh!
Brooke Follansbee
Hi everyone,
My name is Brooke Follansbee. I am a senior at UW-Milwaukee graduating this spring! Thank you so much for checking out our poster! Megan and I greatly appreciate your comments.
Have a great day,
Brooke Follansbee
This is such a cool app! I was temporarily disabled after a knee injury and navigating on campus and in the community on crutches was really challenging. Having a virtual preview and guide to the most accessible routes through different buildings would have been a game-changer for me!