Increasing and improving disabled access to public transport

An overview of European efforts to increase disabled access to public transport, by David Crawford

Out of Europe’s population of 800 million an estimated 121 million, or over 15 per cent, have an impairment that limits their ability to travel and hence their capacity and availability for work, education or leisure (Table 1 provides a more detailed breakdown). At the same time, by 2040, there will be 104.8 million Europeans aged over 65 and 33 million over 80, as compared with 66 million and 16.8 million respectively in 2010.

These figures explain the growing emphasis now being placed on the role of technology in increasing mobility for elderly and disabled people by making public transport easier for them to use. Economic drivers reflect the fact that, as more people remain independent and mobile for longer, the less of a cost they represent to social welfare budgets and the greater the contribution they can make as members of the workforce.

Early onset

Problems can start well before it comes to gaining physical access to transport, with difficulties in obtaining travel information and buying tickets. Websites, as gateways to travel information and ticket purchasing, may not be as convenient to use as they could be, as many have yet to apply the internationally agreed Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) established under the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)’s Web Accessibility Initiative.

This is an area being tackled by Spanish information accessibility specialist 1663 Technosite, which develops Internet products and services aimed at meeting universal usability criteria; over 70 per cent of Technosite’s staff have some form of disability. It has created a three-tier system for evaluating websites for conformity with the guidelines.

Again, user-unfriendly Ticket Vending Machines (TVMs) can present practical difficulties in entering journey details and making the correct purchase using smartcards.

Encouraging solutions

The global 1664 Open Standard for Public Transport (OSPT) Alliance, which is working on improving electronic payment methods, has issued an open invitation to mobility focused organisations to put forward proposals.

Overall, it plans to encourage a wider choice of solutions than the current ‘onesize- fits-all’ approach. Its Cipurse open standard, built on existing international standards for multiple payment, aims to encourage flexible design and deployment alternatives for transit system integrators and consultants and create new market opportunities.

Better provision for impaired public transport users is an obvious avenue for these.

Alliance partner Infineon’s Chis Shire has told ITS International: “OSPT is not planning specifically to define any function which will help disabled people. But having a Cipurse application on an NFCenabled phone has been a stated target from the beginning.

“It would then be technically possible to provide a ‘talking ticket’ or offer a largecharacter display so that users know what ticket they have in their hand and its validity. Alternatively the Cipurse function could be loaded on to a ‘city card’, combining services for the disabled with others. CIPURSE could therefore be of material value to disabled travellers in conjunction with the offerings of other organisations.”

APSIS4all

Targeting the development of such offerings, Technosite is leading the three-year Accessible Personalised Services in Public Digital Terminals for all (1672 APSIS4all) project which aims at easing payment problems. Partially funded by the European Commission under its Competitiveness and Innovation Framework programme, the project, which started work in April 2011, brings together 12 partners from Austria, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Spain and the UK.

In its first initiative, it plans to deploy specially adapted new-generation versions of TVMs produced by German automated payment specialist and project partner Höft & Wessel in a 2012 pilot in the German city of Paderborn. It is investigating two alternative possible web-based technologies.

The first involves would-be passengers logging their specific needs onto a website for coding and storing on a personalised contact or contactless smartcard. Presenting this at a TVM enables this to recognise their preferences, such as for font types and sizes, foreground and background colour, and contrast, and set up the most appropriate available interface, subsequently reverting to normal default settings.

Impairment	Number affected (millions)	% of total
Sensory	26	3.25
Cognitive	55	6.88
Dexterity	35	4.38
Mobility (wheelchair users)	5	0.63
Total	121	15.14

With the second approach, passengers essentially complete their fare transaction pre-trip and then interact with a TVM simply to finalise the process. They again need to log onto a website, using a preset PC or a mobile phone.

The web server will show them relevant pages, using pre-entered parameters, allowing them to input relevant journey details. The system will then generate a ticket request identifier (such as a 2D barcode or security code) for sending to a mobile phone.

At the start of the journey, the intending passenger will either present the code to a TVM reader or enter it on a keypad to collect the ticket.

Pilot

For the German pilot, based on the first approach, local bus operator and project partner PaderSprinter will be using specially adapted Höft & Wessel almex.station TVMs in Paderborn, a thriving centre for the ICT industry. Already designed to meet the existing Technical Specification for Interoperability for Persons with Reduced Mobility (PRM TSI) pan-European accessibility standard, the machines are being refined with extra hardware and modified software to enable them to deliver the new, personally adapted user interfaces.

Passengers will receive smartcards preencoded with their personalised screen and operating parameters. Once the TVM has scanned the card data, the new Höft & Wessel software will automatically adjust the touchscreen display. Höft & Wessel also sees its enhanced design reducing the amount of information that the passenger needs to enter. The system will additionally support ticket purchase using an NFC-enabled smartphone.

OSPT

The OSPT Alliance is an international business grouping engaged in defining a new open standard for secure electronic public transport fare collection.

Founded by smart payment specialist companies Giesecke & Devrient (Germany), Infineon Technologies (Germany), INSIDE Secure (France) and Oberthur Technologies (France), its membership is open to technology providers, public transport operators, system suppliers and consultants and government agencies.Other consortium partners include Austrian interface design specialists The Center for Usability Research & Engineering (CURE); German socially disadvantaged interest group 1667 Sozialverband Deutschland, representing users; and UK assistive technology and standards specialist 1668 John Gill Technology (JGT), which is also a member of the UK’s 1669 Special Needs Application Program Interface (SNAPI) programme. SNAPI’s concept of an adaptable user interface as the basis for developing conveniently accessible terminals is making a core contribution to APSIS4all.

LASSeO

Heading SNAPI is the UK’s 1670 Local Authority Smartcard Standards e-Organisation (LASSeO), created to encourage wider smartcard use by local governments in delivering electronic services in areas including public transport. A local SNAPI trial with potential users ran from May to July 2011 with funding from the UK Technology Strategy Board under its Feasibility Studies in Digital Services initiative.

Working with 1671 Unicard, a company active in citizen and transport smartcard development field that carried out the necessary software development, LASSeO has now produced a specification, based on European standard EN 1332-4, for contactless smartcards to carry personalised tags that will automatically configure service users’ accessibility preferences, for example for fonts and colours, and audio options. Potential extensions include allowing more time for slowly moving or encumbered passengers to pass unhindered through automatic faregatelines, which will again revert tonormal settings afterwards.

LASSeO has already produced aprototype contact card using the specification but, says chair Mick Davies, while this has been well received, it has yet to convince the market of the business case for the product.

The trial aimed to start bridging the gap between the specification and its market adoption by demonstrating practical uses of the specification as the basis for developing a product suitable for worldwide OEM licensing. It has succeeded, says Davies, in: demonstrating all the functions required including those of touchscreens and configurators, and the impact on Microsoft Office accessibility options; proving that the SNAPI encoding can in principle be added (post-issue) to existing smartcards (although there are some limitations); showing that the SNAPI application need take up only 16 bytes on a DESFire 4k card; and providing evidence of the public appeal of the system.

“Early indications,” Davies continues, “are that the UK Department for Transport could be encouraged to recommend the incorporation of the product into all newly issued English National Concessionary Travel Scheme (ENCTS) cards. The integration specifications have already been agreed and the additional cost would be minimal.”

(ENCTS cards are issued to UK citizens who are over 60 years old, or have disabilities. Over 10 million are currently in circulation.)

Further work

Priorities for further progress include engagement with suppliers of touchscreen technology and at least one hardware manufacturer. Davies notes that there is not yet any competing product on the market anywhere in Europe, though the value of the underlying standards is under investigation in Germany within an EU project, and there is interest in them from North America.

Echoing the OSPT view, he also sees good opportunities for fresh niche actors to enter the market: “We consider early movement essential, before commercial, possibly global, companies start] developing competitive specifications which may be proprietary.”