Thanks for chipping in! You can help us out by using our tool to audit the accessibility of neighborhoods. By accessibility audit, we mean:

1. Click Start Exploring.
2. Take an interactive tutorial to learn how to use our tool (if you haven't taken it before).
3. Move along the streets and explore the neighborhood to find and label accessibility features.

Please watch the following video to see a demo of how an accessibility audit works:

Yes! Just follow these steps:

1. Sign in with your account (if you don't have an account, please sign up!)
2. Go to your dashboard
3. Select the neighborhood that you want to explore on the map

Google Street View provides a rich visual data source to inspect a city without leaving your home. However, the images shown are collected periodically every few years. Hence, they might be out of date. Indeed, some users have reported that problems shown in our interface have recently been resolved. Generally, however, street-level infrastructure does not change very often. We have conducted two studies of our own that compare audit data from our online interfaces to audit data collected via traditional, in-person walk-around audits [1,2]. In both cases, we found high agreement--in other words, the images in Google Street View are a good representation of the state of the physical world. This is consistent with findings from previous studies [3, 4, 5].

Moreover, with the advancement of GSV technology, imagery is likely to become even more accurate than it is already.

References

• [1]   Tohme: Detecting Curb Ramps in Google Street View Using Crowdsourcing, Computer Vision, and Machine Learning
  Hara, K., Sun, J., Moore, R., Jacobs, D., and Froehlich, J. Proceedings of UIST 2014
  
• [2]   Improving Public Transit Accessibility for Blind Riders by Crowdsourcing Bus Stop Landmark Locations with Google Street View: An Extended Analysis
  Hara, K., Azenkot, S., Campbell, M., Bennett, C., Le, V., Pannella, S., Moore, R., Minckler, K., Ng, R., and Froehlich, J. ACM Transactions on Accessibility.
  
• [3]   Can virtual streetscape audits reliably replace physical streetscape audits?
  Badland, H.M., Opit, S., Witten, K., Kearns, R.A. and Mavoa, S. Journal of urban health : bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine.
• [4]   Using Google Earth to conduct a neighborhood audit: reliability of a virtual audit instrument.
  Clarke, P., Ailshire, J., Melendez, R., Bader, M. and Morenoff, J. Health & place.
• [5]   Using Google Street View to audit neighborhood environments.
  Rundle, A.G., Bader, M.D.M., Richards, C.A., Neckerman, K.M. and Teitler, J.O. American journal of preventive medicine.

On larger screens, the interface looks pretty small by default. You can make it larger by zooming in using your browser. You can do this on a Mac by holding down Cmd and typing +. On Windows, you would hold Ctrl and type +.

The Jump button can be used when you would like to be exploring a different area for any reason; it allows you to start exploring a entirely different neighborhood! The Stuck button can be used when you get stuck! This can happen when the arrows on the Google Street View interface are missing, difficult to click on, or pointing in the wrong direction. The Stuck button will try to move you slightly further along your route. You can use it multiple times in a row if it doesn't move you to the right place on the first attempt.

Sometimes while auditing, you may have noticed that the navigation arrows go missing, especially when going straight. Worry not, there is a simple solution!

Just click on the "Stuck" button on the left side of the screen! If you still cannot move forward, keep clicking the Stuck button until you are moved to a better spot.

From time to time, you'd observe Street View images taken at the same location at different time, and the environment in the images may be conflicting--just like the pair of the Street View images shown above. In the older image on the left, there is no curb ramp at the end of the crosswalk, but the problem is fixed in the newer image on the right. If you find a similar case, please label the accessibility features in both images so we can keep track of how the environment has changed over time!

Yes, you're right, labels do disappear after you move in Google Street View but don't worry, we store all of your labels.

So, why does it work like this? Well, the answer is kind of complicated but the short answer is: the Google Street View interface is akin to a 3-dimensional interface, similar to moving about in the real world. When you place a label, we convert the 3D position of the label to a 2D lat/long position. However, once you move to a new location, we cannot accurately recompute the label's position in 3D for that new view. See, we told you it was kind of complicated. :) Rest assured, you can always see your applied labels in the top-down map in the bottom-right hand corner of your screen.

Yes. THere is the list of keyboard shortcuts in the table below. There are also keyboard shortcuts for adding tags on the Explore page; there should be an underlined letter on each tag to indicate the keyboard shortcut.

Sometimes the Street View window images could not be correctly loaded and you see nothing but a grey window even if you move around. This could happen for various reasons, e.g., you could be in a location where Google Street View images are not available. To fix this, you can reload your page. Note that all of your previous labels will be saved and you can continue your current mission after reloading.

Yes, here are some examples:

You have more questions? Email us (sidewalk@cs.uw.edu), post a GitHub issue, or follow and talk to us on Twitter (@projsidewalk)!