London has one of the most accessible transport networks in the world. While we have made
progress on accessibility, we recognise there is an enormous amount of work still to do.
One area where we can do more is information. Older and disabled people rely on having as
much information as possible about their journeys, whether planning beforehand or during their
journey, to give them confidence they can use the transport network. For many, the fear of not
knowing means they do not travel at all. For example, it is important wheelchair users know if a
station is step-free, and if it is that the lifts are working that day. Blind and vision impaired
people face a daily struggle of not only finding their bus stop, but then knowing their bus has
arrived.
We are keen to hear from developers:
· Where are you using TFL data for accessibility purposes?
· What issues have you faced in integrating these data sources?
· What additional data sources would you like to see?
Great post. We fully support the push to open up the transport network to accessibility users. We’re constantly looking at ways to improve our accessibility offering. At the moment, we are using the following TfL data for accessibility purposes:
TfL Unified API - live vehicle times and predictions
TfL (legacy) bus stop locations feed
In our apps such as London Bus Checker , we make fairly comprehensive use of the accessibility hints that iOS and Android operating systems allow us to integrate into the UI for better compatibility with screen readers. One example of this would be, when a user has planned a journey, the ‘accessibility’ version of a proposed journey includes text optimised for speech synthesis, whereas the presented view is just a series of icons.
One other accessibility feature that we offer is a ‘speak the times’ icon which is presented by default to accessibility users. This uses text-to-speech synthesis to read out a real time departure board for users so they know which vehicles are likely to be arriving.
We’re always aware that we could do more, though and balancing developer resources against the need to support accessibility users is something we strive to get right - we do prioritise requests from users via our normal support channels and have lots more on our roadmap for the future!
Wondering if there is any data available in any of your data sets that indicates what the transfer time/walking distance is between lines when interchanging at a Tube station? Green Park is an obvious example with a long walk between lines that some users might want to avoid.
Wondering if anything came out of this? As a parent with a double buggy who uses the DLR daily, it would be really useful to know whether the lifts are working at both ends for my journey.
Is there a realtime lifts API available, or plans to introduce one?