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Rachel Zoeller:
This is Rachel Zoeller and.
Joseph Foster:
Joe Foster.
Rachel Zoeller:
And we’re the co-founders of Roll Mobility and this is your Assistive Technology Update.
Josh Anderson:
Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the Indata Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.
Welcome to episode 649 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on November 3rd, 2023. On today’s show, we are super excited to have some of the co-founders from Roll Mobility on. They’re going to tell us all about their app and how it can help folks find accessible places, and maybe even help businesses figure out how to make their places more accessible.
But we’re going to start off with Amy Barry from BridgingApps and an app worth mentioning. Take it away, Amy.
Amy Barry:
This is Amy Barry with BridgingApps and this is an app worth mentioning. This week’s featured app is the Nextdoor app. Nextdoor is an app for neighbors to find out what is going on in their community. Once an account is created, users can quickly and easily connect and communicate via the app, get to know your neighbors, hire babysitter, find garage sales, or sell unwanted household items.
We found the Nextdoor app to be great for everyone, and especially handy for individuals with special needs. The app can be vitally important for sharing real-time information about what is happening in your neighborhood. It’s easy to sign up for a free account, and the notifications can be customized for how often the user would like to be alerted about neighborhood happenings.
In addition to sharing information about break-ins and possible crime, it has been a really helpful tool for getting neighbors together for meetings and activities. The situation where we found it most critical and valuable was during a severe weather event. The app allowed families to get real-time information from multiple sources in the neighborhood, sometimes as specific as street by street.
During this extreme weather event and during recovery, Nextdoor approved an efficient way to connect with neighbors, share supplies, pool resources together, check on elderly friends and neighbors, and offer and receive help. For people with disabilities, chronic medical conditions and even the elderly, this easy-to use-tool can be a great way to connect with others.
The Nextdoor app is currently available for iOS devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit BridgingApps.org.
Josh Anderson:
Listeners, navigating the world presents many challenges for individuals with different disabilities.
It’s very frustrating to show up to a place or event with friends and family, only to find out that it’s not fully accessible.
Our guests today are from Roll Mobility and they’re working to make this whole process a lot more well, accessible. Rachel, Joe, welcome to the show.
Joseph Foster:
Thank you.
Rachel Zoeller:
Thanks for having us.
Josh Anderson:
Yeah. I am really excited to get into talking about Roll Mobility. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners maybe just a little bit about yourselves?
Joseph Foster:
My name is Joe Foster. I am a recovering physical therapist assistant who lives in Golden, Colorado, and we saw a need for this.
It was just made very apparent and had the time, energy and the place was right. How could you not?
Rachel Zoeller:
Right. I’m Rachel Zoeller. I am also a recovering therapist. I practiced as a pediatric physical therapist for the better part of 15 years.
In 2019, I sustained a spinal cord injury and now am primarily a wheelchair user. When necessity calls, you have to take it on, right?
Josh Anderson:
Most definitely. Well, we wish you great luck in your recovery, for sure, from those past lives.
But I guess as we start talking about Roll Mobility and you brought this up, let’s start at the beginning. Where did this idea come from?
Joseph Foster:
I have been lucky enough to work with the US Paralympians and BethAnn Chamberlain with Nordic and Para Biathlon. We tried to take a group of athletes out to a restaurant for dinner in Breckenridge, Colorado, which is a tiny, little ski town. We went through what we thought was a very stringent process of trying to find a location.
People always look at me and laugh when they know already how the story ends. But we got to the place that we had called and they had, of course, said, “We’re accessible, we’ve got an elevator down to the bathroom.” There were three steps to get inside and the elevator was so small, that the athletes’ chairs did not fit into the elevator.
I said to them, “But this never happens if you’re in a big city, this never happens to you,” and they all laughed at me. We started, it just shifted the perspective and started looking through the lens of how accessible are places really? Realized that even if you go to a restaurant that is accessible and all they have is bar-top seating everywhere, it still feels very inaccessible.
It’s still not a place that I would want to spend a Friday night looking at the very bottom of the table to have a drink. We ran some focus groups and talked to people that know better than I do. Just tried to listen very closely to what they would want and what an app like this would look like, and started putting it together.
Josh Anderson:
Awesome. You led me right into my next question. So describe, and I know this is always a little bit tougher to do in just voice, but describe the Roll Mobility app to me.
Rachel Zoeller:
The app, after you download it and sign up for our newsletter, takes you through, you can pick up a location near you. You can either search for locations that have already been rated by somebody in the Roll community. Or if in your area or near you, the place you’re going hasn’t been rated, the app will prompt you to leave your own review. Then the app will take you through a series of guided questions.
We aim to have an objective rating scale. We want to teach, we want our app to be able, of course, it’s designed for people with disabilities in mind. But a happy byproduct is that anybody, an able-bodied ally, can use the app and become a reliable rater in their own community. A lot of the problem we run into with existing data is A, it’s scarce, and B, it’s often subjective and unreliable.
If it’s a business saying, “Yeah. Sure, we’re accessible.” They often haven’t taken into consideration the point of view of somebody who’s using an assistive device or is in a chair, or maybe they have their own intentions behind giving themselves a good rating. This way we’re collecting really accurate data from anywhere.
Josh Anderson:
Nice. Rachel, some of those prompts and questions, what kind of information can be relayed? Because you mentioned as a business, I think, “Oh, there’s a ramp so I’m accessible.”
Anybody can make it, but what’s some of the other information that can be relayed by those folks putting the information in there, to the folks that are using the app to find accessible places?
Rachel Zoeller:
Yeah. Well, the app takes you through the experience start to finish. We want to know about the entrance outside, of course, can you even get in the building? How easy was it to get into the building? You get extra points for having things like an automatic door opener. The building might be accessible, but when you’re met at the door with an automated opener, you’re like, “Wow, my needs were thought of. I wasn’t an afterthought.”
That’s something we really want to be able to capture too, is that sense of really you are welcome here. Then in the interior space, we’re looking for things like space in the aisles. Maybe a restaurant is pretty accessible, but they’ve tried to pack too many tables into a space, and you can’t actually pass through in a chair. Or they’ve got too many high-top tables and we want to know are there plenty of low-top tables with removable chairs that somebody in a power chair could access?
Then it will prompt you through the internal space of the building. Then we ask what a lot of people really, really care about is about the bathroom. Not only can I get there, but is it big enough for my chair? Is a stall big enough for me to maintain my own dignity to shut my chair into that space? How many times have I encountered a bathroom where so close, the grab bars are there, the space is there, but then the door to the stall swings in.
That happens really, very often. It seems like such a simple thing. Then it calculates an entire score for the whole space.
Josh Anderson:
Very cool. Very cool. Well, you mentioned the door swinging in. You thought about it, you did all this great stuff and you just messed up the end game, missed that last piece.
In doing this and in the reviews and everything else, have you guys found any patterns or major gap areas in accessibility that continuously are showing up?
Joseph Foster:
That’s a great question.
Josh Anderson:
I was just wondering because in talking to folks, everyone’s experience is so different, and we work all over the state of Indiana, which isn’t that big.
But in different areas, it always seems like there’s different kinds of things. I just didn’t know, especially with having users all over, if there were just gap areas, that just continuously seemed to show up.
Joseph Foster:
I think what Rachel was about to say is doors are incredibly different everywhere you go. A handle could be the difference of opening a door or not opening a door. How heavy the door is if the automatic closer is not adjusted appropriately, and the door is very heavy, we’ve seen that.
Doors and then I also think in the hotel spaces, it’s lack of maintenance for locations. We’ve had at least 10 people say, “Oh, here’s the description of the room.” Then when I get to the room, I actually had to go back down to the front desk and ask them for the bench that they said was in the bathroom or other equipment. Rachel, am I missing anything there?
Rachel Zoeller:
Yeah. I think the most common thing that I really see is door function. I recently had coffee with a friend of mine, who has a quadriplegic spinal cord injury. I even let the barista know, I said, “I’ve got a friend that’s going to be coming up here. You’ve got a front door that’s pretty heavy. My friend has limited hand function. Can you please keep an eye out from her?”
We’re sitting in the back of the space and it was totally missed. My friend sat outside for five minutes before I was able to get to the front. I came from the back of the place, all the way to go open the front door for her. In the space itself, was really pretty accessible, but then we get to the bathroom and it’s a little congested.
Because it’s coffee, we needed to go at the same time and there wasn’t space for two chair users to navigate at the same time. But then she also told me she really struggled with the hand lock. We’ve got this new, stylish door handle, but the door lock is a push pin. Well, that takes a lot of index finger dexterity. You need to be able to point and push.
Of course, I have full hand function and that definitely even got missed on my radar, but it continues to be a door can really… Opening doors gives independence and accessibility. It can be my friend got herself dressed that day, she lives independently, drove herself there in her truck, parked independently, did the transfer and was met at the door. That was the blockade to her independence. How frustrating.
Josh Anderson:
For sure, for sure. Again, it’s that thing that if you don’t work or are in this space and/or live with a disability, that you may not think of.
Along with that, how does Roll Mobility work to raise awareness about accessibility and to help others maybe make their spaces fully accessible?
Joseph Foster:
We have not been met by a lot of locations that when they hear that this is an issue or that there is something like this, they’re not interested in making their location more accessible. We really feel like there’s just a general lack of awareness around what that looks like and what that feels like.
It’s that cycle of, “Oh well, we don’t need to be accessible because wheelchair users don’t come here.” But wheelchair users don’t come here because you’re not accessible, so of course, you don’t see them. I think as we’ve grown the community and as we have done more things, it’s been very, very neat to see businesses get on board and be very interested.
We just had a night out with a company called Denver Pub Crawl, and so we had, Rachel, how many people did we have with different disabilities?
Rachel Zoeller:
About 40.
Josh Anderson:
Oh, nice.
Joseph Foster:
Yeah. We took over the streets and showed up in locations and it was very interesting. You could see that there were patrons and some of the bar managers came up to us and talked to us about what that was like.
You can see them start to see where people are having difficulty, what it looks like to order at a bar that’s way up in the air for you and doesn’t have a cutout.
Rachel Zoeller:
Even to sign a credit card, right?
Joseph Foster:
Yeah. It’s neat to see as people have more awareness, sure there will be one-offs where people are ignorant to what this looks like and will say, “Oh, it’s too much or it’s not going to happen.”
But for the most part, we’ve really been met with, as people just have more awareness, they’re very interested in collecting your dollars amazingly enough.
Josh Anderson:
You bring up a great point, that’s what I was about to say like, “Oh, I don’t want customers.” I don’t understand how a business, your job is to turn a profit and the more people that come in your door, the easier that is. I’m glad that at least the resistance seems to be going down a little bit. Like you said, there’s always going to be one-offs.
There’s always those folks that either don’t care, don’t understand, or I don’t know, insert excuse here, but I’m glad you are getting folks listening. I’m glad you have a tool where they can maybe find their gaps and see what people are actually saying, instead of trying to do it all on their own.
Because as we’ve talked here, it’s easy to miss those things that the bathroom’s fully accessible, everything’s in here. Great, there’s plenty of room, but no one can get in the front door, so none of it matters.
Joseph Foster:
There’s a great Times article about a bar that’s owned in New York by two people who utilize wheelchairs and the writer also utilizes a wheelchair, and she was there and she said the whole place was great. Then I got into the bathroom and I had to call them, because they had placed actual candles along the side of the bathroom, and the candles were directly under the grab bar.
When I went to grab the grab bar, the grab bar was extremely hot, and so it happens to all of us. We make mistakes and we don’t always see everything. It’s just having someone who is willing or having a place like this, where there’s a compendium of information where you can go and say, “Oh, this is something that maybe we missed.”
There are places where, yes, it would be very difficult to make it 100% accessible for a large power wheelchair, but there’s a lot of places where, “Hey, if you moved the tables six inches one direction, it’d be a lot easier.”
Josh Anderson:
For sure. I am just glad that people are willing to listen. I feel like that’s something that not just in this space, but in most spaces, people are afraid to make mistakes or listen or just learn.
If you don’t know, that’s fine. But then once you find out that something’s inaccessible, just working towards making it more accessible is the absolute best way to go.
Rachel Zoeller:
We talked about the willingness for business owners to want to know more or want to help, want to make improvements. But it’s wild to me the times that you’re met with resistance because that also does happen, that people are quick to throw up their hands and say, “Oh yeah, we’re grandfathered in.” When we look at the numbers, 12% of the US population, according to the CDC, has a mobility issue. That’s nearly one in eight people.
That means every single person in America, knows somebody that’s been affected by disability or has a mobility issue, that causes them to have difficulty with walking or difficulty navigating stairs. Those are really large numbers. Considering that anybody could become disabled at any given moment, you would think that people really have a self-interest in being a part of making a more accessible world. We harp again and again, that Roll really is for everyone.
We all benefit from accessible and universal design. It’s not just people with disabilities, it’s moms parents with strollers, it’s delivery folks using carts. Maybe you have luggage or your hands are just full, but we all benefit from ramps, elevators, automatic door openers, and enough space to move around easily. Especially, considering if we’re all lucky enough to live long enough, your body will fail you at some time.
There’s a saying that we’re all just pre-disabled, and that’s something I really want the able-bodied community to really hear, is if disability hasn’t affected your life yet, it will.
Josh Anderson:
Something I did want to talk about, just because in emails with Rachel, I know that you guys have a small team.
I know I’ve got a couple of you on here, so could you take a little bit of time and just tell us a little bit about your team?
Joseph Foster:
Sure.
Rachel Zoeller:
Yeah. Well, you’ve got two of us here, myself and Joe. Then our marketing director, Laura, and then our two app developers, Shane and Arunu.
Shane is based in the UK and Arunu is based in Brazil, so we’re already spreading the globe and trying to get our app out worldwide.
Josh Anderson:
Guys, if you happen to have one, could you share a story with us about someone’s experience, maybe using Roll Mobility?
Either to put information in or maybe somebody being able to find a place that’s a little bit more accessible for them, or just some feedback that you’ve heard?
Joseph Foster:
Yeah. I think Rachel can speak to this better than I can likely, but what we’ve heard over and over from people and when I was running focus groups.
We’d have 10 or 15 people with various levels of disabilities. What I heard over and over again, was it’s exhausting trying to find places.
Rachel Zoeller:
Yeah. The disabled life truly is an exhausting one, and I think much of your audience already knows that. When somebody’s already done the research, somebody has gone to a place, we’ve vetted this, maybe you’re an expert in your local community.
You know all the great hotspots and happenings that are accessible, that information stays with you if we don’t have a place to catalog it. What we really aim to do, is create ease so that folks with disabilities can save their energy for much more important and exciting things.
And be a one-stop shop of information so that all that individual information doesn’t just get lost to the ether, right?
Joseph Foster:
Definitely.
Rachel Zoeller:
We’re not doing work over and over again.
Josh Anderson:
For sure, and you really brought it up there, the information’s hard to find. It’s scattered and who knows how really good it is. Actually, having the folks that need the information, providing the information is really just an amazing tool.
Well, I just have to ask you, because I know you’re getting everything ramped up, everything’s going, what’s next? Where do you see Roll Mobility and this app and everything going in the future?
Rachel Zoeller:
Well, hopefully we get funding. As a small startup, we’d really love to just keep growing, to be able to keep adding features that the disabled community is asking for.
Right now, we’re really geared towards people with mobility issues, but as we grow and expand and we can bring in different points of view, we hope to be a compendium of information for all disabilities.
Josh Anderson:
Most definitely. Most definitely. Well, hey, if our listeners want to find out more, participate, get the app, what’s the best ways for them to do that?
Joseph Foster:
The website is a great place to start. It’s www.RollMobility.com. Our Instagram page is curated by Rachel and myself, though she’s got final say for everything that goes on there.
Does an incredible job and that’s just also @RollMobility. We’ve got a Facebook and I don’t know what our TikTok name is right now.
Rachel Zoeller:
If you search Roll Mobility, we come up, that’s R-O-L-L, like a wheelchair with roll.
Josh Anderson:
Awesome.
Rachel Zoeller:
Sometimes that gets lost on audio.
Josh Anderson:
Sure, sure, sure.
Joseph Foster:
I was also going to highlight what we have in the works at the moment is we’ve got picture and video, which is rapidly approaching. Our sincere hope, what we’ve heard from people is, “Words are great, it’s great to have a narrative, but especially if you’ve got limited hand function, it’s hard to type a lot of words about a location you’ve been.” We have been working really diligently the last few months to incorporate picture and video.
When you arrive at a location, you just tap through the questions, and then you can add picture and video to the review. You can do a roll through or do a walkthrough and take a video of a location. Or you can take pictures of the front door or even tag things that are inaccessible, or that you find really gratifying, like a broken sidewalk or those challenges. Spots that parking that is listed as appropriate parking, but maybe something there is not set up right or things like that.
That is one of the things that is happening, and hopefully that will launch in the next two weeks, but we want things to be very polished before we send them out. We feel like this community’s been burned quite a few times with getting equipment and getting technology that is not as polished as it could be, and is unusable for periods of time. We have really been trying to make sure that that is not something that we’re doing. We’ve been doing a lot of testing and a lot of bug squashing.
Josh Anderson:
Awesome, awesome, awesome. We will put links to everything down in the show notes so our listeners can go and check it out. I’m sure with the pictures and videos, that probably helps the business owners too. If they’re trying to make their stuff more accessible, if they can look there and really get an idea of exactly what it is and exactly where they’re inaccessible.
Well, Rachel, Joe, thank you so much for coming on the show today for telling us all about Roll Mobility. Just what a great tool it is to really help folks be able to find out if the places they want to go are accessible, or just find out what’s around them that’s fully accessible or where those gaps might exist. Thank you so much for your great work and for coming on the show.
Rachel Zoeller:
Yeah, thank you for having us.
Joseph Foster:
Yeah, thanks.
Josh Anderson:
Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter @IndataProject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation or INTRAC.
You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the Indata Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host.
This was your Assistive Technology Update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the Indata Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.