There are around 240 million people worldwide with cognitive disabilities, many of whom have difficulty reading and/or writing.
A large proportion of them long for more independence: to be able to do things themselves, take care of themselves, manage appointments independently and have the freedom to decide for themselves what to do, how and when. With Independo, we want to promote the independence of this target group by translating text into pictograms and pictograms into text.
Vienna, Austria (© Unsplash, Anton)
The Independo Calendar will not remain the only product for long.
Our first project, the “Independo Calendar”, aims to make conventional calendars such as Google Calendar or iCal accessible to people with learning difficulties in reading and/or writing. By working closely with the target group and our translation algorithm, which converts text into pictograms that the target group is familiar with, we have achieved this goal. For the first time, people with learning difficulties can now manage their digital calendar independently using symbols.
With netidee to Independo Maps: research and open source
Street maps often contain a lot of text, small symbols, and complex information, which can make them hard to access for people with learning difficulties. That’s why we already explored, in a design thinking process, how digital maps can be made easier to understand.
With support from netidee, we were able to take the results of that process further from a technical perspective. A key outcome is an open-source overlay for the Leaflet map library. It lets places on a map be displayed with, among other things, standardized pictograms. A demo is also publicly available.
The plugin was deliberately built as an open-source project so other software teams can use the results for their own inclusive digital applications.
A standalone Independo Maps app is not currently planned. The research, mockups, and the open-source plugin remain publicly available and provide a foundation that other projects can build on.
What the project investigated and what we took away from it is described on the Independo Maps research page.
For an overview of all of Independo’s open-source projects and research, see the Independo Open Source page.
