What does mobility look like for different people? To achieve ever-better mobility for all as Toyota evolves as a global mobility company, it actively works with innovative startups like Sociability that bring new inclusive mobility ideas to the market and answer that question from different perspectives.
Sociability is a service that is innovating the accessibility space by empowering disabled people. Through the Sociability app, disabled people can find reliable and accurate accessibility information – and it can transform their lives.
To understand more about the day-to-day challenges faced by disabled people, the work of Sociability and its team, and how Toyota contributes to and benefits from this collaboration, we spent the day with the Sociability team in Brighton. Watch the film below, or read on to find out more about the team and their aims.
Sociability was inspired by the firsthand experience of its founder Matt Pierri. When starting university, he discovered that finding accessibility information was incredibly hard and meant contacting each location directly. “It was really tiring, really challenging, and really difficult to find any information, let alone information at the level of detail that I needed,” explains Matt.
To address this real-world problem, Matt and his student friends began to crowdsource detailed local accessibility information for colleges, libraries, halls of residence, restaurants and bars, and published it online for the benefit of others. “That’s where Sociability really grew from,” says Matt, “[an] organic need for this information to allow disabled people to go out and about and do the things they want to do with the people they love.”
Matt’s experience is a snapshot of a much greater issue: “One in five people have a disability of some kind,” he explains. “A lot of those disabilities are invisible and actually 80 per cent of those disabilities are acquired, so people aren’t born with them – it’s something that happens to them throughout their lifetime.”
Consequently, Sociability is aiming to empower people with accessibility for all. It uses Matt’s original concept of user-generated, crowdsourced accessibility information and supercharges it, covering an ever-growing number of areas and venues for which users can find detailed accessibility information to assist with their specific accessibility needs.
One of the ways Sociability grows its database is through organised mapping days where Sociability team members and users…
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