Pandemic lockdowns gave us all a sense of what it’s like to be restricted from going where you want to go. It is an experience that was already familiar to Matt McCann, a co-founder of Access Earth.
McCann, who is from Kildare, has cerebral palsy and uses a rollator to walk. He has always had to be careful about where he goes, checking in advance to make sure it will be accessible.
The idea for Access Earth came about during a trip to London. He rang the hotel to make sure it was fully accessible to someone with mobility issues. Absolutely, came the reply. When he got there, there were three steps up to the front door. Worse, when he finally made it to his room, there wasn’t enough space for him to turn his walking frame.
“Why did you tell me it was accessible?” he asked as he checked back out. “Because it’s on the ground floor,” came the reply. He wondered why there was no online resource to check the accessibility of a venue.
McCann had studied chemistry at college and developed websites as a hobby. He took a graduate diploma in IT and followed it with a master’s degree in software engineering. If anyone could build such a resource, it was McCann.
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His time in college had reinforced the need. “I had great friends but I didn’t want to always be the guy saying, ‘I can’t go to such and such a place because there are steps.’ It took away the spontaneity of college.”
His friends were great about trying to check out such things for him in advance. “But they told me too, there is really no site you can go on online to find out,” he says. “There was an independence piece to it as well. I just thought, people should not have to ring ahead for you. Accessibility information should be accessible to everybody.”
From his research he discovered the scale of the problem. In Europe alone more than 135 million people live with a disability. “More than one billion people, or 15 per cent of the world population, have some form of disability and when you add their family and friends going out with them, or even when you add parents with buggies, almost everybody is affected in some way by accessibility issues,” he says.
The London hotel visit was the last straw. “I wanted to develop some crowdsourced central repository of information, to gather experiences and aggregate them — with pictures — so that it would no longer be a question of one person’s opinion of what’s accessible.”
The plan for Access Earth won him a place among the finalists of Microsoft’s Imagine Cup competition in Seattle, by which stage he had been joined by his co-founder, and now chief operating officer, Donal McClean.
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Together they secured EU Horizon 2020 funding to develop the Access Earth app, which has already mapped 110,000 locations, thanks to community mapping events that have taken place across the world.
The business, which today employs five people, runs team-building mapping events for organisations too. Funding from the European Space Agency is enabling it to map accessible car parking spaces in cities using satellite imagery and drones.
For McCann, Access Earth is to public spaces as food critics are to restaurants. “When it comes to public spaces, we want everyone to be an accessibility critic.”
The company is raising funds on the crowd investment platform Spark, to enable it to scale up. This too is about accessibility, McCann says. “We’re delighted to be taking a crowdfunded approach so that everyone can be part of the journey.”