Re: Accessible road maps

Jesper Tverskov wrote:
> I am looking into the problems of making road maps on the net more
> accessible.

Matthew Smith replies:

I can't say I have a solution, but this is something that I was looking at last 
year and will be looking at again in the near future.

I use Mapserver <http://mapserver.gis.umn.edu/>, an open-source system, for my 
mapping purposes.  The application is fed from a GET query string (delimited by 
the old fashioned &, which took me a while to find out whilst I wondered why my 
application wasn't working).  This means that you can write your own HTML to be 
accessible as you can make it.

Panning/Zooming relies on an imagemap.  My thoughts on this are to generate a 
list of localities as links from the same data that forms the appropriate map 
layer to allow these to be tabbed to.  You could also assign links to measured 
points on the map so that it may be panned by selecting 
north/south/east/west/northeast/etc...

The ultimate challenge is to be able to get data from a mapping system in such a 
way that we can use the application with text/voice browsers.  Once GIS 
functionality appears in the production version of the MySQL database that I 
use, I will be giving this some attention.

Cheers

M

-- 
Matthew Smith
Kadina Business Consultancy
South Australia

Received on Friday, 28 May 2004 05:46:40 UTC