ABSTRACT
The accessibility emerged in the early sixties, with a concept of "barrier-free design" and in the nineties, due to advances in technology, internet usage, among other factors, has been expanded to "universal design" (Mazzoni et al., 2001). In the city of Curitiba-PR Brazil, for example, a platform lift is used, allowing the entry and exit for wheelchair users at certain bus stations (known as “tube-stations”), as these bus stations are located above ground level. Evaluations of environments/objects for their accessibility are being developed utilizing different approaches, such as questionnaires (Mont'alvão, 2006; Bacil and Watzlawick, 2007; Carvalho e Silva, 2007), checklists (Aragão, 2004; Ely et al., 2006), post-occupancy evaluation (Marghani et al., 2010), etc. Therefore, this article aims to evaluate the accessibility of tube-stations’ platform lifts in the city of Curitiba-PR, through four parameters developed by Dischinger et al., 2009 (apud Ely and Silva, 2009): displacement, spatial orientation, use and communication. For this purpose, each parameter was related to design principles proposed by Lidwell, Holden and Butler (2010), for the development of a questionnaire. Ten (10) individuals were analyzed (mostly university students), that fit the type of public appropriate to the study. The ethical aspects of this research were answered by “standard ERG BR-1002 - Code of Ethics of the Certified Ergonomist (Abergo, 2003)”. The participants were informed about the objectives and procedures of the study and then signed the Term
of Consent. After the instructions of the task, a questionnaire was applied, aiming to evaluate the various elements of the platform based on their post-use evaluation. Each element was related to a principle of design that, in turn, was related to one of the four parameters of accessibility. This questionnaire was applied after the first use of the lifting platform for individual “non-wheelchair” users, and who had no familiarity with its technology, in a simulated procedure. The participants went through the process of entering and exiting of the tube-station, operating the lifting platform, using a wheelchair. The method, therefore, was the post-task evaluation, with the use of questionnaires, since this allowed to obtain the users’ opinion about the product. Were, then, analyzed metrics based on specific issues of usability of the product, guided by the evaluated parameters. As there are several different kinds of platform in use within Curitiba, the tube station located at “Polytechnic Center”, at Federal University of Paraná, was chosen for the evaluation process. This platform was chosen because it can be autonomously activated by the user, unlike other types of platform that can only be activated by the agent of the public transportation system that works in the tube-station. The obtained data were statistically analyzed based on their means and standard deviations. Finally, the results were discussed.
