Customizable vector map for visual impaired ppl
Friday, March 14th, 2014As part of my Bachelor Thesis I investigated accessibility for digital maps from the angle of visual impairment. Taking advantage of characteristics of vector maps, one of the results is a highly customizable map.
Instead of using pre (server) rendered raster images, the browser itself takes care of rendering vector data which represents the features in the tile. For example roads are sent as LineStrings, buildings, land and water as Polygons and POIs as Points. Javascript based on vector-osm converts them to SVG, the browser takes care of the rendering. Vector tiles are coming from Mapnik Vector Tiles in GeoJSON format using OpenStreetMap as data provider.
