By checking accept upon sign-up, you agree that you have read the terms and give your consent below. If you are under 18, please have your parent or guardian read, explain, and agree to the terms.
The Project Sidewalk’s goal is to collect the data about the accessibility of the physical environment. We want to enable technologies that let people with disabilities—such as wheelchair users—identify the accessibility of public space prior to their travel. The project achieves this by inviting community—you—in the process of collecting the accessibility data. By using the online tools that we developed, you can “audit” the accessibility of physical environment. The tool will let you label and report presence and absence of accessibility features in street-level imagery. This document describes what will happen to your contributions if you choose to contribute and what data we collect and how we use it.
In addition to the contributions you make towards the goals of the Project Sidewalk, we collect additional data about you to support and improve the operation of the project. The project is continuously updated to promote the community to participate and to become the most effective platform to collect and deliver accessibility data of the physical environment. To achieve this, we continuously gather and analyze how you interact with our tools. By creating an account, participating to the accessibility audit, or using the website, you acknowledge the following Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.
The accessibility data will be made publicly available. The primary goal for this project is for the collected accessibility data to be available to the researchers and developers who create technologies to support people with disabilities. Therefore, if you contribute to the Project Sidewalk, you grant the University of Maryland and its collaborators, permission to use and distribute your contributions however we like to further this goal, trusting us to do the right thing with the accessibility data.
The tool records how you audit. We look at the recorded logs for science and to improve the tools’ user experience. We are recording how you use our tools and audit street-level accessibility for analysis and research. The tool gathers and reports data generated by your activities in the audit. If you create an account, this data will be associated with your account. If you audit without an account, data will be gathered anonymously by assigning you an anonymous identifier. Data may be associated with your IP address.
We are sharing what we learn with others. Data used for research may be made public or shared with collaborators. Data and analysis may be shown on the website, and used in external publications, presentations, promotional materials, and other public venues. Data logged by the tools may be shared with our collaborators for analysis. We will contact you for permission before externally associating data analysis with your account name. However, your account name may appear without explicit permission in external demonstrations of the website, including presentations, videos, screenshots, and publications.
We may ask you questions about yourself. You do not have to answer them. To better understand who contribute to the project, we may occasionally post research surveys on the website. These surveys will ask basic questions about topics such as motivation or demographic information (e.g., age, gender, and mobility level). Participation in these surveys is entirely voluntary.
We may send you email about the project. You can ask us to not send you email. Project members may contact you with your account email. When creating an account, you provide an email address. You can opt out of this email contact at any time.
If you want us to stop gathering data from you, stop using the website. You can opt out of further data gathering at any time. To do so, discontinue use of the website and tools associated with the project.
We may change these rules. You will have a chance of agreeing to the new rules. This policy may change in the future. You will be asked to agree to the new terms.
Project Sidewalk is operated by Makeability Lab at the University of Maryland, College Park. Please contact us if you have any questions or concerns. We can be reached at sidewalk@cs.uw.edu. If you have questions about your rights as a research participant, you may contact a member of the University of Maryland’s Institutional Review Board Office at irb@umd.edu or (301) 405-4212. Please note that emails are considered insecure and privacy is not guaranteed.
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