One week to go! 🚀

The countdown is on! Next week, we’re proud to bring Sociability to the world.

Our shiny new app will be available on web, iOS and Android, and we couldn’t be more excited! This week, we’ll be releasing some sneak previews & screen recordings of the app to get you in the mood — so please keep a close eye on our socials to stay in the loop!

Alongside this, we wanted to give you more insight into the app and what you can expect from Monday. To date, most of our messaging has been heavily focused on raising awareness about the problem that we’re solving & growing a following and a community of passionate changemakers to kickstart this accessibility movement. We’ve touched on:

Which brings us to today and our thoughts on how you can use Sociability to help drive this social change.

In 2011, the WHO noted that “disability is part of the human condition — almost everyone will be temporarily or permanently impaired at some point in life, and those who survive to old age will experience increasing difficulties in functioning.”

Without being overly dramatic — this simply means that you will, at some point, likely experience a disability of some kind. It may be permanent or temporary, it may be debilitating or non-invasive. But, regardless of your personal experience, the broader point to make is that everyone benefits from a more inclusive & accessible world, all the time. And, in that vein, when we ask for your help to empower disabled people — we’re also asking you to help empower yourself, whether a present or future version.

On that, we often get asked by our non-disabled friends whether they could use Sociability. The answer is, of course, YES! But to help illustrate this more clearly, let’s consider a few different scenarios in which Sociability is useful to everybody:

• You’re organising a dinner with friends and your best friend just started dating a wheelchair user. You’ve never had to think about accessibility before but now you need to quickly figure out what that means & where to go so that your friend (and her new squeeze) can join in…
• You’re taking your Grandma out to buy her some new clothes for Christmas but she now uses a walking frame & needs fast access to the toilet. You want her to feel comfortable — as she’s often anxious about venturing outside these days — but don’t know which shops are suitably set up…
• You’ve just been tasked with organising the company offsite weekend and you learn that the newest team member, who you want to make a great first impression on, is blind. You need to find a series of venues — from accomodation to eating to partying — that will accomodate their needs…
• You’ve recently broken your leg and can’t go safely up & down stairs. After a few weeks housebound, your friends invite you to the pub but you’re not sure if it’s step-free or not…
• You’re travelling overseas in a new city with all your luggage and you’re accomodation isn’t open yet. You need to find a nearby café without a flight of stairs, and with plenty of space inside to let you keep your bags with you…

And we could go on and on. The point is that accessibility is varied, multi-faceted and inherently individual. Accessibility needs are context & time-specific — and when they affect our loved ones, they affect us too.

That’s why we’ve built Sociability to be as user-friendly & lay-person (read: non-disabled) friendly as possible. You don’t need to be disabled to help make room for inclusion — in fact, in many cases, our non-disabled friends are much better placed to help simply because they can access more spaces, occupy more places & shine a brighter light on issues that are often overlooked.

So, when we say the mission is to grant access for all — we mean it. Through Sociability, we want you — whether you’re disabled or not — to find accessible places, add information about accessible places and to share accessible places with friends & family. Let’s vote with our feet — accessible venues are more inclusive to all, and that’s a benefit to everyone — not just those who have accessibility needs today.

The countdown is on. One more week until you’ve got the tools to make a powerful change right there in the palm of your hand.

Be sure to keep a close eye on our socials this week as we talk you through how exactly to use Sociability — for you, your friends & your family — and whip up some excitement amongst our passionate community & supporters.

As always, please keep sharing & spreading the word. Together, we’re making the world a more Sociable place for all!

#ShareSociability #GrantAccessibilityForAll #MakeRoomForInclusion #AccessForAll #FindTagShare #OneMoreWeek

Originally published at https://www.sociability.app on August 24, 2020.