Navigating Accessibility with Roll Mobility

[00:00:00] Speaker A: Welcome to the underrepresented in tech podcast, where we talk about issues of underrepresentation and have difficult conversations. Underrepresented in tech is a free database with the goal of helping people find new opportunities in WordPress and tech.

Hello, Samah.

[00:00:18] Speaker B: Hello, Michelle. How are you?

[00:00:20] Speaker A: I’m good. How are you?

[00:00:23] Speaker B: Good. Busy, busy. They have a lot of upcoming events, and I know they have two amazing events coming up.

[00:00:32] Speaker A: Yeah, I have WordCamp Rochester this Saturday in person, right here in Rochester, New York. And then next week, on Wednesday and Thursday, we have WP Accessibility Day, which is all about online accessibility and 24 24-hour free events. If people want to know more, go to 2024 WP Accessibility Day to register. It will be pretty awesome, and I’m very excited about it. I am the lead or marketing organizer for that event, which is cool. I am on vacation for five days after that because Mama needs a break.

[00:01:05] Speaker B: I’m going to reach out to you just to bother you, you know, just occasionally.

[00:01:10] Speaker A: Just keep sending me the funny TikToks you send me. I love that. And speaking of TikToks, speaking of TikToks, we are blessed to have a couple of really awesome guests with us today, Rachel Zoller and Joe Foster from the Roll Mobility app, which I’m pretty excited about because I found them on TikTok. I reached out to them, and they actually replied, which I think is pretty awesome.

Welcome to the show. Tell us a little bit about yourselves, where you’re located, and if this isn’t your primary job, which I heard a rumor it might not be, maybe what else you do in the world? Rachel, we’ll start with you.

[00:01:42] Speaker C: Awesome. We’re located in Colorado. I actually just left Denver on Saturday to become a nomad for the next six-ish months with my wife. So, our first stop is down in Trinidad, Colorado. We’re on the New Mexico state line.

[00:02:01] Speaker A: Very cool.

[00:02:02] Speaker C: So very cool. Very exciting, very different.

Let’s see. Full time.

Well, I was telling you before we started recording that we roll full-time because we fill every crevice.

[00:02:19] Speaker A: We know what that feels like. Yes.

[00:02:21] Speaker C: We moonlight as other people who have to pay, get jobs that pay to keep roofs over our heads.

[00:02:28] Speaker A: Absolutely.

[00:02:29] Speaker C: So I do some communications for another nonprofit, for a nonprofit in Denver. Oh, cool. Yeah.

[00:02:37] Speaker A: So, are you staying in Airbnb?

[00:02:40] Speaker C: Yes, right now, we’re in Airbnb until we get back closer to family.

[00:02:45] Speaker A: So we can talk about this a little bit later. But I think the Airbnb app needs to be updated so that we understand that as wheelchair users and people who have mobility issues, it’ll look like it might be. And you have to scour those pictures to see where the steps are because it’s always a challenge.

[00:03:02] Speaker C: Absolutely. Yeah. It’s not even required that they take, like, a picture of the entrance. And I think what we’ve discovered through some of this already, like, looking ahead and booking ahead, is that you know, places the hosts have to opt in to list themselves as wheelchair accessible. If you use the wheelchair-accessible filter, it pretty much annihilates the map.

[00:03:25] Speaker A: There’s nothing left.

[00:03:26] Speaker C: There’s nothing left. And then. But people don’t want to opt in even if they are accessible because they don’t want to be held accountable if, like, something’s off. So something needs to happen on the Airbnb side, too, that, like, is educating people with parameters, saying, like, yeah, you can opt-in. You’ve got a place. This place that we found for this week caught my eye. It had a ramp in the front, and it’s a little. It’s just a little old house. I think for a chair much larger than mine, it might. It might not work. But it does have this kind of interesting bathroom where there’s a door from two sides, and so there’s a ramp to get in and grab bars in the shower. So clearly, somebody with a disability who lived lived here. But where the toilet meets the shower, you can’t pass through in my chair. So I can access the shower from the bedroom. The toilet and the sink from the living room.

[00:04:24] Speaker A: That’s what you call a true workaround because you got to go around to get to either one.

[00:04:29] Speaker C: Literally. Literally.

[00:04:32] Speaker A: I had a very accessible unit in Athens, Greece, last year, and it was advertised as such. My daughter found it. She was traveling with me and literally could roll everywhere in that entire space. And it was gated. There was a gate that closed in behind our car.

It was a dream vacation. It wasn’t even a vacation, but it would have been a dream destination, is what I should say, because everything was so accessible for me.

[00:05:00] Speaker C: Yeah. I was in Greece for a month last summer and left as many ratings as I could on the app in Athens. And I think, yeah, Athens was extremely accessible.

[00:05:10] Speaker A: Yeah, I was impressed because for such a historic city, I did not expect that. But anyway, let’s. We. We have another person here, so before we dig deeper into all the issues. Cause I’m excited to talk about them. Joe Foster, tell us a little bit about yourself.

[00:05:24] Speaker D: I’m Joe Foster. We started this app on the back of a napkin because we kept hearing from people that they did not know where places were accessible and the information that they were getting was bad. And it was just, even just now, watching you say it was so amazing, we had a place that is the feeling that we get every time a new review pops up where it’s like, oh, now somebody will be able to get excited about going here and going there and being out and about without being anxious about being able to get into a place.

[00:06:02] Speaker A: I have visited places and forgotten to use the app and then couldn’t figure out how to go back and put a pin and those kinds of things. And I’m sure there’s a way to do it. I’m just. It was tired, whatever, anyway. But it makes me want to go back to those places just so that I can use your app to tell everybody how great the accessibility is. So there’s a place, I will tell you, this is the coolest, coolest place in Niagara, Canada.

So that’s about an hour and a half drive for me, that lets you go into the old electric plant. There’s a mine shaft that is now an elevator that takes you all the way down to the river level, and there’s about a half-mile walk. That’s all the old tunnels, which was the old, like, water escape. Right. You get to the bottom, and there’s a little patio-type area, and you’re at the base of the falls. It’s super cool. The entire thing was rollable. I was so excited. It was pretty cool. My friend who doesn’t have wheels, had to stop several times to relax at the little benches because she was exhausted. I’m like, my battery’s full. Let’s keep going.

So you said this was on the back of a napkin. Can you tell us when you all thought about this and how you actually got this? First of all, tell us about the app because we haven’t even got there yet. People listening are like, “What are you talking about?” Tell us about the app, and then a little bit of its history.

[00:07:24] Speaker D: So the app is a community-driven mapping tool that people can use to update the status of accessibility at locations worldwide for free, anywhere they want to try and think of anything that I’m leaving out.

It allows people to leave pictures and videos, and it leads them through questions. So one of the things we always try to highlight is role, which is an app that anyone can use able-bodied, um, all the way down to, you know, children can use this app. If they can read and answer questions, they can use the app.

But it’s really just a way to get information about places. We ran some focus groups and tried to figure out what was important to people. And we’re constantly tweaking the questions all of the time to try to match what people are telling us. But yeah, it is just a way to actually get real information. We found a lot of places that don’t know what they don’t know, and so we kind of breadcrumb them along. Nope. If it has four steps to get inside, that does actually make it inaccessible.

Yeah, but we started. Started the app. We went to this small town in Colorado called Breckenridge, and I was working with us, Paralympics at the time, and we tried to take some athletes to dinner, and we thought that we had done a really good job of picking a place. And nobody’s wheelchair would fit in the elevator that took them down to the bathroom. And there were two steps to get inside, and I came back and just saw this vital need and was amazed that it didn’t already exist, that nobody had really done this in the way that we thought it needed to be done, and talked a friend into starting it and made a version that looked terrible and worked even worse.

[00:09:33] Speaker A: That’s how it starts. That’s okay.

[00:09:36] Speaker D: Yeah. Learned a lot along the way. And, you know, our. Our goal is to just continue to listen to what people want and what people need, and we feel like if we do that, then we’ll have done okay.

[00:09:49] Speaker A: You still have the napkin?

I thought you’d be like, “It’s framed.” Look right here, Michelle. It’s in a frame.

[00:09:58] Speaker B: That would be very cool if you still have it.

[00:10:01] Speaker A: I thought she was going to ask the hard-hitting question. She asked about the napkin.

How long ago was it that you started scribbling down the ideas and putting things into production?

[00:10:16] Speaker D: Gosh, almost four years ago.

[00:10:17] Speaker A: Okay.

[00:10:19] Speaker D: Yeah, we had a real version that sort of worked, which we launched two years ago.

And then we just made one of our biggest updates: We switched mapping providers because of our map. We realized that our mapping provider said that they had a lot of locations and places on the map available, and that just wasn’t true. It was like one out of every three locations, especially in rural areas, was just. You can search for it.

[00:10:55] Speaker C: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:10:57] Speaker D: Just didn’t exist. So we just switched to a very large mapping service that runs with Schmoogle, and so if you find it in that map, I’ve heard that it will show up in a roll, which is very, very cool. Now, there’s a lot of opportunities. We just talked to somebody about rating bus stations and bus stops and transit stops and things like that, and we thought, oh, gosh, how are we going to. Maybe they’ll drop a pin and a picture and all this stuff, and you go into the map, and if you search in a specific way, every single bus stop in Colorado pops up. So we’re working on all of the things all of the time.

[00:11:44] Speaker A: And you didn’t have. You didn’t have to make Rachel go and stop at every one of those stops to put a pin, right?

[00:11:50] Speaker C: No.

[00:11:52] Speaker D: That would be. That would be a bridge too far.

[00:11:57] Speaker B: Maybe she would love to do that in Europe. Maybe you’d love to do that in Europe.

[00:12:02] Speaker A: The elevators in Italy are ridiculously small, by the way. Every single one of them was different and difficult to navigate. But anyway, that’s another story. Everything. The infrastructure in Europe is so old that I think it’s being retrofitted to try to fit without. Anyway, long stories. But, Rachel, I want to ask you, as somebody who uses wheels outside of my house, I can become incredibly frustrated sometimes. And I have found some cities to be much better than other cities in general. And I have found some locations, obviously, to be better than other locations.

In 2022, I wrote an article called Five Days Without a Shower because of my horrific experience at a conference where I couldn’t. I can’t lift my legs to get into a bathtub. But it was handicapped accessible as their terminologies, right? Room, paddle to get in and out of the doors. The paddle didn’t work. The shower didn’t work. The most successful part of it was a turnaround in my scooter. And I didn’t have to back out into the hallway again, right?

I got stuck in the bathroom, in the lobby. Not a single door in public spaces had a paddle on it. It was one of those horrific experiences. As a result of that and writing that article in WordPress alone, things have changed. So that article spurred handbooks, like a section of the handbook for WordCamps, to do better. Every major WordCamp has contacted me, and I don’t mind doing the work for them.

I often say you shouldn’t ask the underrepresented person to do your homework for you. In this case, this is my passion, so I don’t mind doing the work with them to know how high countertops should be so that I don’t feel excluded. How wide aisles should be in the cafeteria so that I don’t feel excluded? Should they remove chairs at every table so that somebody can just roll up? All those things have now been included because of one article because I have a big voice in our community.

I love that your app makes it so that people don’t necessarily have to have a big voice. They can just log in and make some statements and make things clearer there. What has your experience been in dealing with or. I don’t even know what I’m trying to ask exactly, but has this app made it so that people are looking at their own facilities and trying to be more accessible? Have you had that experience at all, like, with people that you talk to?

[00:14:39] Speaker C: Sorry, let me clear my throat. Yes, I think not yet to the magnitude that we would hope. We really hope that this app will become one of the social pressures of businesses wanting to do better. We always say we don’t want to be a yelp. We don’t want to be associated with negative reviews. But the truth is, it’s like, if it’s inaccessible, it’s inaccessible. And that information is for our community so that they know where to not waste their time or spend their money. Right. When there are plenty of businesses out there doing good work, that gets it. I think it is from the. From the app, because we’re still growing, and one day we hope to really be a household name that really comes with that. But it will come with conversations in person. I’ll just be like, if you just had a trash can that wasn’t a push pedal, this bathroom would be 100% accessible, simple things. So I think most of that just comes still from, like, face to face advocacy.

But we have, yeah, a number of stories of places making small changes.

We have some good friends at a brewery that just moved into a new space. During their opening week, we got to come in, roll through, and tell them what was and wasn’t working.

When they first took over the space, there weren’t bumpers in the parking lot, so the cars didn’t know where to stop, so they would come over the sidewalk that you needed to ramp into the entrance. And then there was also, like, a bike rack there. So, I have this picture that’s been up on the Internet where the bike tire and the car bumper overlap the sidewalk from the accessible spot to the door. And, you know, immediately, well, first, I had to come out. I was like, I can’t get to my car.

Yeah. Since I’ve been here, I’ve been blocked in.

Yeah.

[00:16:40] Speaker A: It’s not that you couldn’t get access. You couldn’t get out.

[00:16:42] Speaker C: I couldn’t get out. I guess I live here now. Could I get a free beer? No, but the next time I was there, the bike rack had already been moved, so there were plenty of people out there that were listening, you know. Just this weekend, I stayed in two different hotels. And one was like.

A nicer, higher-end, relatively speaking, new hotel. They just opened in July in Denver. And just a hotel that was beautiful, had a lot of art and thought things through.

But then they got into the bathroom and into the accessible room, and there was a towel tower, like a square tower, blocking the lateral entrance to the toilet. Like, just a movable thing, I drug it out into the hall. It’s just like silly things that they just hadn’t thought through. Of course, like the mirror. I still couldn’t even see myself in the mirror and at the sink. And then I get into the shower. It’s late, we’re really tired, and the shower’s a roll-in, and it’s got a bar but no built-in shower chair. It’s a brand-new hotel. No built-in shower chair. I call down and request the chair. It takes them nearly an hour to get it up there because they’re literally running from accessible room to room to try to find this white plastic bench that doesn’t match the vibe at all. Everything else is really nice. This is a bottle with. There’s a nice bottle of bourbon and a minibar, you know, kind of. Kind of hotel room. And then this rickety, like, shower bench that wasn’t even safe; honestly, it was a little uneven. There was no call button. Fortunately, my transfers are pretty simple, but I’m thinking about friends of mine who have fallen in the shower. Fallen in showers at hotels.

[00:18:36] Speaker A: So scary.

[00:18:38] Speaker C: And had, you know, you’re alone, you’re naked, you’re vulnerable, and now you’re having to call the front desk to get peeled off the floor. That’s a real situation that happens to folks. But then, conversely, I stayed at a Super Eight down here in Trinidad Sunday night.

And the. It was a great. It was still a plastic bench, but it was the one that kind of came over the lip of the bathtub. So, it makes for a really easy lateral transfer. The mirror and everything in the bathroom is perfect. No notes. Right.

[00:19:12] Speaker A: I love. Yeah.

[00:19:13] Speaker C: With a call, with a call button right by the. So this, like older, like, not great, super, super eight had it dialed. And this new hotel just missed the mark.

[00:19:22] Speaker A: And maybe the new hotel thought if you drank enough of the bourbon, you wouldn’t care if you had a shower.

[00:19:28] Speaker C: They were open and receptive to feedback, which we know is not always, always the case. They did compass a nice breakfast the next morning, so we’ll take it. Sure.

But what? Very long answer to your question is, yeah, people are willing to make a change. And I think it is a no better, do better, but at the same time, it’s fatiguing because we’ve had 34 years, 34 years of the ADA, which is still just the bare minimum. But people never think it’s just like an afterthought. Maybe we should have somebody with a disability come through this space and see if the design works. Test the user experience.

[00:20:08] Speaker A: Jen. Such a simple solution, too. I mean, crazy. I am. Yeah, I’ve had similar situations. I think part of the problem is people don’t know what they don’t know. So we try to educate them, but they still don’t do better sometimes. And I think of it: I was in Thailand last year, and for some of these, I was at another word camp, word camp Asia. And some of the companies have these parties outside. You know, you’ve been to conferences; they have little shindigs. And because I had written that tell-all, or whatever you want to call it, the expose on inaccessibility in the WordPress community, these companies wanted to invite me. So they made sure, to their knowledge, that these places were accessible. And so I get this frantic dm on my Twitter account from one of these companies saying, Michelle, they told me it was accessible. It’s not accessible. I am so sorry. There’s no way for you to be able to attend unless you’re willing to leave your wheelchair on some random pier and get on the. And let us help you onto a boat and off a boat. And I said that’s not something that I’m comfortable with, of course.

And he said, when he got there, he said, I thought you said it was accessible. And the guy said to him, what, she can’t do three steps?

[00:21:34] Speaker C: Oh, my goodness.

[00:21:35] Speaker A: No, she can’t. She said a wheelchair, of course, she can’t do three steps. What part of the three steps seems accessible to you? And so we still have those kinds of issues happening. My goal with our podcast and other things that I do is to educate people so they will learn and do better. Because if you don’t know, you don’t know. I get that. Right.

There are ways to educate yourself, absolutely. But at the very least, listen to people who need accessibility to tell you what you have to do to help make some change. I have been asking all the questions. I’m going to let Samah ask some questions so she’s not just a pretty face.

She does all the research.

[00:22:13] Speaker B: She’s the one that’s so passionate about it, you know, you’re so passionate. I’m just enjoying it.

[00:22:18] Speaker C: You have a quick anecdote to add? Oh, sorry. Go ahead, Joe.

[00:22:22] Speaker D: I was going to say, I do want to go back to that and say it is, there’s so much nuance in this space. And that’s why, as we learn more, it’s like pictures and video are so, so important because even within the community, you can have the same diagnoses but a completely different experience. And there’s a great, there’s a great story. There’s a restaurant in New York, and I’m going to forget the name, but they are owned by a couple in chairs. And so the, you know, the writer went into the bathroom. She was in a chair. She was so excited, but somebody had placed candles underneath the grab bars. When she went to use the grab bar in the bathroom, the grab bar was hot to the touch. And even for people, you know, you’re owned by, you’ve got somebody who is there who utilizes a chair full time. And still, sometimes you’re, you’re, you know, trying to make all the aesthetics work. And there’s a lot of nuance in this space. And so it’s a lot of listening or, hey, being open to some feedback and knowing what we can do in each space. And a lot of times, you know, in that instance, it’s like just moving the candles, and everything is fine.

[00:23:39] Speaker A: Everything’s good. Yeah.

[00:23:41] Speaker C: No brainer. Yeah. I was going to add that, you know, in part, people don’t know better and do better because you don’t see as many people with disabilities out in the community because places are inaccessible, so you don’t get this opportunity to interact as much with people with disabilities. You think about underrepresentation, people think it’s like, oh, it’s 1% of the population. No, 12% of the population has a mobility impairment. Right. That’s one in eight people.

There’s this fallacy that people with disabilities don’t exist. So we don’t need to make accommodations, so they don’t come here, we don’t see them, and places remain inaccessible. So it’s, you know, I think that narrative has changed with social media and disabled voices being amplified in recent years. And I hope—I hope that we have a new wave of disability rights on the horizon.

[00:24:39] Speaker A: I also want to piggyback on that kind of go back to what Joe said because your wheelchair experience and my wheelchair experience are two different experiences. I’m using a mobility scooter with a deck in front of me, handlebars, and a basket, so I can’t just pull up to a table. I can’t just sit. I have to either pivot my seat, which means my legs don’t touch the floor because of the height, or I have to transfer to a chair, which I can do. Right. That’s, to me, the easiest thing to do, but that’s not necessarily other people’s experiences. In the summer, I was at a conference in Canada, and it was a beautiful, brand-new facility. Paddles on the doors. They had separate, accessible bathrooms with a paddle on the door that I could paddle to lock it. Like, it was beautiful. It was not easy to turn my scooter around because it was still, maybe, if I had a zero turn right, like in a wheelchair. Wheelchair, I would have had better accessibility. But the soap dispenser was too high for somebody seated to reach the soap, and I thought, I want to wash my hands, too.

My feedback was that if you do this next year in the same space, bring soap so we can at least have it on the countertops. I mean, a dollar for a bathroom, right? It is not a big deal. But also, they had no elevator to the second floor, so this is a brand-new building. The green room for speakers. I was. A speaker was on the second floor, so I didn’t have to. I didn’t get to have the same experience that other speakers had either. And so I think, like, that I would have got. I would have given them a decent rating, except for those two little things, right? So I would have been. But I could have told people about that if I had remembered to use the app. When I go back next year, I promise I will. Samah, what questions do you have?

[00:26:24] Speaker B: Yeah, thank you.

Mia. I want to return to the app because I want to learn more about it. You said it’s going worldwide. Is it multilingual, the app? What are your long-term goals for the app, and how do you see the app becoming more and more involved and making the community better? And if there’s any exciting news you want to share about the app, Is any something you would love to share in your doing in the app shortly?

[00:26:59] Speaker D: Those, like, six questions. I’m never going to be able to remember any of them.

[00:27:04] Speaker C: No.

[00:27:04] Speaker D: World domination.

The first question.

[00:27:07] Speaker A: I love that you need to pedicate.

[00:27:14] Speaker D: To take over the whole world. The app is currently in over 40 countries.

We’re just in Spanish and English, but by the end of October, we will be working with a company that does translations. So, by the end of October, we hope to be in at least twelve languages.

[00:27:37] Speaker B: Wow.

[00:27:38] Speaker D: Like, ten more languages. Have to do math in my head. Twelve languages. That would equal twelve languages.

[00:27:42] Speaker B: Nice.

[00:27:43] Speaker A: Phenomenal. And, Rachel, you said 50 countries.

[00:27:46] Speaker C: Yeah, over 50 countries.

[00:27:47] Speaker A: That’s amazing.

[00:27:48] Speaker C: It’s really exciting. It’s, you know, we. We thought we were just like, okay, we’ll focus on Denver and some cities in the states. But then, when you have a viral moment, it takes on a life of its own. And because it can be used worldwide, it is being used worldwide, and it’s exciting. We don’t take the time to sit back and just recognize what we’ve done, what this thing has taken on a life of its own. But when you. You can zoom in, play around on the map, and just go anywhere in the world and see reviews popping up; it’s just incredible.

[00:28:23] Speaker A: That’s awesome.

Savalo, any other five questions?

[00:28:29] Speaker B: Yeah, I was quiet for a long time, and now, like, just ask all of them for me. I want to see how you see the app involved in supporting the community better.

And is there something exciting you want to share about the app? You said earlier that it’s going to be translated into more languages, and Rachel said it’s going to be available in about 50 countries. Are you going to expand more?

What is the plan for the app?

[00:29:00] Speaker C: Well, the app can be. It can keep expanding at users’ will, but we’re working on other features to better serve others, like disabled populations. Right now, the weighted score, the objective measure, is based on the physical location because if you can’t get in, it’s just. It’s not accessible. But working on different ways, we’ve, you know, the community is vocal, as we all know, and they are quick to tell us what, you know, people want to know, like, is it service dog friendly? Can. Are there adult-size changing tables?

Can we have information about the lighting and the noise level? We really do want to incorporate that, like making the app more accessible to folks who are colorblind.

And as quickly as we can chip away at these things, we are. Yeah, that’s awesome.

[00:30:03] Speaker B: Yeah, that is cool.

[00:30:04] Speaker D: Yeah, it’s difficult because this is.

We are very passionate about this, but it is more than a passion project; we want this to turn into something bigger. This is such a vital thing. And we’re in this weird space where if we were smaller, we would still qualify for free tiers of information. And because we are big enough now, things cost money. Um, and so, you know, development time costs money. Um, just the time, the time involved, and the experts involved in helping us do these new features. We’re just as impatient as everyone else with what we want to see. It’s one of those things from, like, if I could snap my fingers and immediately change everything in the app to include, include the noise ratings for these locations and how bright it is in these locations, you know, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that would be amazing. But that all takes. It all takes, you know, the nuance and trying to figure out how to best display it on the map and all of those things. So we. We ask for patience, but we are.

How are you?

[00:31:28] Speaker A: Go ahead.

This is what happens when you’re recording things. It’s okay. Continue.

[00:31:35] Speaker D: So we are raising money now. We are crowdfunding so that community members can own a piece of the app. And it is not. It’s kind of like a Kickstarter. It’s called wefunder. It’s specifically for these things.

People have the ability; it’s within role mobility. You can also own a piece of this app.

[00:32:04] Speaker B: Yeah, we’ll share the news because I think it’s really important. And I think we often travel in or outside Europe because Michelle and I attend many events. WordPress is doing much, much better in terms of accessibility. A lot of the event organizers share information for accessibility. I think adding information to this app would also be awesome. So, I will share the news in the Netherlands and everywhere I can. And if we share the link to the information you shared, we can also share it in the post and with everyone we know.

[00:32:47] Speaker A: So I first saw you on TikTok. As I mentioned, I think you’re doing a great job with the videos and things you’re doing there, not just about the app itself, like trying to explain what it is, but showing people what accessible versus inaccessible means. I think that’s great. I love all the work that you’re doing there.

I have the app on my phone. It’s right there, and I promise I will use it more than I have been. It’s a habit, right? You have to learn. You have to ingrain yourself in these habits.

It is not.

It’s free. The app is free. Just download it in the app store. And you are not asking me to put money in through the app. And I’m not seeing ads displayed on the app. So, unless I’m mistaken, you have ads somewhere, but I haven’t seen any. How do you intend to keep it not only physically accessible but monetarily accessible? Because there are a lot of people in the disabled community who are living on very low incomes, and so an app like this is perfect for them. However, having a monthly or whatever input is not necessarily sustainable. So, how do you intend to keep this rolling forward? No pun is intended. Or, pun intended, without asking people to pay to use the app there?

[00:34:11] Speaker D: It.

It’s exciting to hear you say that because we really tried to make the ads as classy as possible, not masterful.

[00:34:20] Speaker A: So there are.

[00:34:21] Speaker D: That’s okay, though.

Some ads are there, and we are actively looking for tourism boards. We know that there are states and cities that care about accessibility and are excited about showcasing their accessibility and the work that they’ve done.

And so we just. I can’t even talk about this. We just worked with the state working with us to highlight the accessibility and tourism in their state, but it’s non-negotiable for us. From the very beginning, it was to be free forever for this community. We understand that there are enough barriers. We don’t need to be gatekeeping this information.

And there’s. Yeah, there was. There were a couple of things on that napkin, and one was, this is not. This is not something. There will always be a free, you know, version or free, some way to access this that is not gatekept.

[00:35:28] Speaker A: We have previously had sponsors here for underrepresented in tech. The only sponsors on our website now are people who have given us their software so that we can use it for our website. It’s important to us that any sponsors that we have had in the past, we’re lucky that we don’t have to do that anymore.

But any sponsors we’ve had in the past, we made sure that we were vetting them so that they weren’t using us to say, “Look how we are so interested in underrepresentation.” But they might be a company that literally has a 2% underrepresented population in its entire company. So, vetting that is not easy. Are you also vetting your advertisers to make sure that they practice what they are helping you preach?

[00:36:14] Speaker D: We’re in this funny space where, you know, we feel like the community, we listen to the community, and we have not had somebody, you know, come to us and say, hey, we saw an ad for something on the app, and then we had a terrible experience with it. Yeah, exactly.

Rachel, you do. You tell me quite often that one of the nice things about being in a chair is that shoes last a really long time.

[00:36:37] Speaker C: They do.

[00:36:40] Speaker A: I can attest to that as well. And some shoes are more accessible than others.

You don’t have to tie, right? You can slip your feet into them, so these aren’t out of the question.

[00:36:53] Speaker D: We haven’t. We’ve been really lucky. We just partnered with Logitech, and it was obvious from the beginning that they were interested in it, living it, and excited about it. And, you know, you can. You can tell when somebody’s phoning it in. You can tell when somebody starts talking to you about accessibility and doesn’t. They don’t care.

And we just partnered with them where they launched the app to their community and then said to them, at the end of this, for persons with. With disabilities, day, whoever has left the most reviews will get some Logitech swag. And it’s all internal. They haven’t taken credit for it, which is also a green flag. Yeah, it’s pretty obvious when you talk to people who are just checking a box of, oh, this is accessible or are excited about it and want to see more people out and doing things. Rachel’s got something to say, and I’m excited to listen to it.

[00:38:02] Speaker C: Oh, well, mostly, yeah. We are in this kind of in-between space where, right now, some of the ads we’re running are some of those, like, free candy crush kind of ads that you do to get the ball rolling.

However, the companies reaching out to us are from the community. Right. They see that we have this target audience, and it’s companies that do ramp installations or relevant things. So it’s pretty easy to say, “Oh, yeah, you’re already doing work in this space, and you want to, like, you see that we have your target audience,” so it does kind of do some of that vetting on its own.

[00:38:46] Speaker A: That’s nice because, like, if your idea of accessibility is you can come in through the kitchen, that’s probably not the people we want advertising on his face.

[00:38:56] Speaker C: I want to return to you. You talked about a lot of the videos that we do tend to be this education between accessible and inaccessible. And thanks for saying that, because that’s really my goal: to call in our allies and do a lot of education about it.

These are really simple things that would make a space accessible. You keep putting physical barriers and a stack of high chairs in front of the door. Come on.

But this is an awesome thing the app is doing because the role is for everybody. We have.

And sama, to your question, what do we hope to be? I hope that we’re a catalyst for social change. I hope we’re educating a broad enough section of society to say, hey, accessibility matters. Accessibility benefits everybody. Everybody benefits from clear pathways we’re calling people in and bringing awareness of what we’ve got. Now that we’ve got.

When I was in Europe, the infrastructure, yes, was not where it might be here in the United States, but social awareness was really far ahead. So the fact that the museums were free, I didn’t have to wait in line.

I had a designated bathroom that was like lock and key, but that ensured that nobody else was using it. There’s that, like, in Europe, people without disabilities do not use things that were not designed for them. In America, that’s not the case. My biggest soapbox is just, you know, if it’s especially, like, in bathrooms, if it’s not for you, don’t. Don’t use it. And I wish we had that culture here, and I hope the app is helping us get there.

[00:40:54] Speaker B: We have the European accessibility act, and they are doing a lot of law. So next year we will be accessible. Our buses train too. It’s for everyone with a chair. So everything is organized. But during next year, there’s a huge, big movement, even the government, forcing companies who are hosting their websites in Europe to be accessible. Not only the shops, not the buses, and that’s something Europe is doing more advanced in the states or some countries, but I hope that will also be the same because it’s really. It’s really important to talk about it and do something about it, not only you talking about it.

[00:41:38] Speaker C: Yeah. And there’s. There’s an access card in Europe. Is that right?

[00:41:42] Speaker B: Yeah.

[00:41:45] Speaker A: Okay, there’s a thumbs up to counteract that.

[00:41:49] Speaker B: I like this one and will make it fun.

[00:41:51] Speaker A: So.

[00:41:51] Speaker D: Yeah, there it is.

[00:41:56] Speaker C: There’s. Yeah. I’ve heard people. People on the Internet talk about having. Having a card that allows them to access bathrooms throughout, you know, throughout the country.

[00:42:06] Speaker A: That’s awesome.

[00:42:07] Speaker C: Which I’m sure is like a system that’s not perfect and has its flaws, and then you, like, lose your card, forget your card, those kinds of. Those kind of things. But it’s. They’re thinking of it. They’re thinking of something.

[00:42:19] Speaker A: I used a bathroom in the Frankfurt airport that was specifically for the disabled in it.

When I rolled in, I thought, “It’s either a jungle gym or a ropes course, or it’s perfect.” And I chose perfect.

There was so much equipment in there. I was like, I don’t know where to look first. But it was. It was better than Christmas morning. I swear. It was awesome.

[00:42:47] Speaker C: But I did have to. The signage to get there could have been better. I did go to the. To the regular bathroom in the Frankfurt airport. To the regular. Whatever.

[00:42:57] Speaker A: Yeah.

[00:42:58] Speaker C: And realized there wasn’t an accessible stall. Then, I had to backtrack and push back down to find the accessible bathroom.

[00:43:08] Speaker A: So I did not have my device. They should have brought it up between flights for me. So I was at their beck and call with their wheelchairs. They dumped me in one place and then left me for 4 hours where I couldn’t go anywhere. I was stuck there, and then they moved my gate, so I had to find a way to get to the new gate. So that’s another story altogether. But the bathroom was awesome once I got there.

[00:43:30] Speaker C: The bathroom was awesome.

[00:43:31] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. We need to wrap it up soon, so I just want to. I want to ensure we answered all of Samah’s questions, too. Is there anything else you’d like to tell us about? About the app? How do people find you if they do? I mean, how do they find you? The app? Is there a website where they can learn more about you and the funding process?

Joe, go.

[00:43:55] Speaker D: Yes, there is.

We are very easy to find. We’re on both the Apple and the Google Play Store.

Role mobility. R O L L, mobility.

The funny part about the name is that it was a placeholder name.

We said we’d figure out something better eventually, and role has kind of stuck. So role mobility, we’re role mobility on Instagram and TikTok. We also have a website that is role mobility.

And so if you Google role mobility.

[00:44:35] Speaker A: I’m following you in all the places, and we’ll be sure to put the links to those in the show notes as well. Rachel, anything else you’d like to add?

[00:44:44] Speaker C: Man, we’ve covered a lot here this morning, for sure, and that’s fun. We love a dynamic conversation versus just our stale talking points. So, thank you for highlighting us in a fun, dynamic, and interesting manner.

[00:44:59] Speaker A: Will you come back in a year so we can discuss the progress?

[00:45:02] Speaker C: Yes.

[00:45:05] Speaker A: Samah, any last thoughts from you?

[00:45:07] Speaker B: Not at all. I wish you all the luck, and hopefully, it will grow more and more. And we’ll definitely share the news about the app.

[00:45:15] Speaker C: Yeah.

[00:45:18] Speaker A: Well, that’s it for today. Thank you, everybody, for hanging in there with us. You can find us on YouTube. You can also find us on our website and all the places where podcasts are. Just look for underrepresented in tech. Thank you both, Rachel and Joe. Thank you, Sama, for a wonderful week. We’ll see everybody next week on underrepresented in tech.

If you’re interested in using our database, joining us as a guest for an episode, or just saying hi, go to underrepresentedintech.com. See you next week.