Mitigating situational disabilities in information systems for situational awareness in flood situation with universal design
Abstract
Natural Disasters have been affecting humans for centuries. It remains a fact that we are living in a world where different kinds of terrible natural disasters occurred that have created a mess in the socio-economic sphere of the affected areas. Despite the availability of early warning systems, it is impractical to live in an area without natural disasters. The effect of climate change catalyzes the occurrence and severity of natural disasters including floods. Floods are one of the major natural disasters that contribute to the high disaster death rate in the global south, especially in Nigeria. This requires an effort of collaboration from all stakeholders in designing, building, deploying, and maintaining inclusive disaster management systems. This effort can never be achieved without the application of universal design principles in designing rescue applications.
In this research work, we have studied situational disabilities and their effect on situational awareness based on the data collected from victims in Nigeria. Moreover, we have evaluated the accessibility of a mobile application called SETY that is used to report an emergency incident at the time of natural disasters in Nigeria. The research work contributed to identifying situational disabilities and their corresponding accessibility barriers based on difficulty experiences collected from the research participants in Nigeria. Moreover, this study proposed a framework that guides the design and development of rescue applications that can work without the Internet to regain or attain situational awareness.