Hi Michał,
On 12.01.2011 12:45, Michał Borsuk wrote:
Am 12.01.2011 12:37, schrieb ant:
On 12.01.2011 09:52, Michał Borsuk wrote:
The visually impaired are a very small minority, and clearly OSM has
different, more basic issues to deal with. We should focus on the
mainstream first, to get OSM out of the beta version it is now.
It is not our primary aim to serve some kind of mainstream. It is to
collect any geographical data that could be useful to somebody. And
yes, "somebody" includes blind people, too.
I did not exclude blind people from the pool of users. I simply said
that they are a minority, and should be treated as such. Not with
greater privileges than most of us. Therefore I see no point to spend
great amounts of time mapping lines in a special way so that we could
preserve the fact that line X calls at bus stop Y in each direction. I
simply see no point to focus on this, in the present state of OSM.
Look at this Western European town:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/?lat=49.10581&lon=6.71405&zoom=15&layers=M
I mapped one line through the town, and then simply had to get a level
lower, to first map the streets, because simply there was nothing to
draw the bus lines on. Later somebody added buildings from the French
Cadastre, and the town looks grotesque: now I can guess where the
streets should be between thebuildings. But still, there is no point to
map more lines before the street network exists.
In such a situation should we really think about the blind, or should we
focus on the very basic: to put the lines on the map?
Certainly it doesn't make sense to talk about bus stops when the road
network isn't even finished yet. Totally agree.
The point is, we are in the process of establishing a kind-of-standard
about public transport network. There has been lots of struggle about
this topic, and therefore it's quite an important process.
Since I am working on a project that deals with navigation for the blind
and visually impaired, I know how important these mapping standards (if
you can call anything in OSM a "standard" at all) are. If we continue to
stick to the old scheme, or any extremely simplistic scheme, we are
simply missing the basis for future development in the area of blind
people's navigation (and probably many other areas as well).
I'm not saying everybody should do it now and everywhere. But the
proposed public transport scheme is a solid basis to work with and one
that is scalable enough to meet requirements we might not yet be
thinking about.
cheers
ant
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