Accelerator Of Inclusion And Mobility For Territories

By Valérie Schutt – Communauté Urbaine de Dunkerque (France)

The accessibility is a territory’s prerequisite for both economic development and social inclusion.

Disabled persons’ inclusion is far from being effective in France as elsewhere. Still few public establishments communicate on the available infrastructures to welcome this public.

The universal accessibility of a territory depends on its capacity to create and deploy an offer allowing everyone to reach the set of places and proposed services. It is a stake which cannot be carried by a single actor but by a set of actors to monitor and engage in radical evolutions: local authorities, transport companies, storekeepers, craftsmen, hotelkeepers, restaurant owners…

This is the way the accessibility will aim towards the universal and will allow to meet the expectations of a population wider than are the elders, the families with strollers, the convalescent persons, …

It is the choice that made the “Communauté Urbaine de Dunkerque” (CUD) by choosing to involve whole of the territory’s actors (users, associations, ERP administrators, transport in common companies) to carry out a policy of transparency and accessibility continuous improvement of its territory.

One of the pillars of this project rests on the massive deployment of a digital solution allowing a 360 ° vision of challenges to take for a better accessibility and a better inclusion on its territory.

This solution, developed by a company growing from social and solidarity economy, is named “Picto Access”. It targets the needs of the citizens, the tourists of the CUD, the establishment administrators and local authorities.

Bound for the users, the “Picto Access” service is a free Web and mobile application which allows at the same time to collect user impression regarding the accessibility of a place simply and effectively. It also allows users to reach the information relative to these places through finding any place around him; reaching a descriptive page of the place and its accessibility if it exists; Sharing their vision of the accessibility by fragility through pictograms of color and enquiring how the community felt the accessibility of the establishment.

Bound for the administrators of establishment, Picto Access is a Web service and a consulting service allowing to accelerate the awareness on the disabling situations led by their built frame and the lack of appropriate services. It allows every administrator to become an actor of its establishment and to communicate on its accessibility. Picto Access addresses all types of establishment receiving of public but also the transport services.

Bound for local authorities, Picto Access develops management and monitoring tools allowing simple visualization of where the community is the most active; to filter the results by fragility, by category of establishment or by geographical zone. Picto Access, deployed by the CUD on all its territory, has four major innovations which make it a unique service to this day:

A referencing under eight pictograms to adapt itself better to the uses of the weakened people;
A referencing of the felt of accessibility codified simply under 3 colors: green / accessible, orange / accessible with accompaniment, red / inaccessible.
A synthesis of felt by the community aimed for the citizens, companies and communities.
Digital tools allowing to spread information of accessibility everywhere people would go and look for it (web sites, social networks, emailing).

The impacts and profits are multiple and affect all the actors:

For territories: Simply measuring the evolutions of the territory regarding accessibility and prioritizing the efforts to put in.
For companies: Enhance their brand image, widen/better satisfy their clientele and optimize their investments.
For the users: favor the feeling of inclusion and improve concretely their living conditions on the territory.