UCLA’s OIT (Disabilities and Computing Program + GIS Research Group) is in the process of building a crowd-sourced campus map that will empower people with disabilities to share and access relevant information to help them get around campus. Our goal is to provide a web platform for people to combine their accessible travel discoveries.
Zig is a cross-departmental collaboration between the Office of Information Technology, Luskin School of Urban Planning, the Healthy Campus Initiative, Office for Students with Disabilities, and Facilities Management. To this point, each party has volunteered significant resources towards the existing application. The mission is to ensure that persons with disabilities, whether wheelchair users or visually impaired, have a more conducive climate for their chosen pursuits at UCLA.
People with mobility impairments may have difficulty finding a pathway that traverses the campus. Existing print and online campus map resources often lag behind in reflecting the rapidly changing construction environment on campus.
In the future, we plan to open the map for crowd-sourced additions, allowing the Zig Map to grow in accuracy and relevance for the full user community. In the spirit of the disability rights slogan “Nothing about us without us,” the Zig project stresses the importance of contributions by the disability community throughout planning and implementation of the project.
Check out the alpha version of Zig below: