iAccess Life: Making spaces more accessible with Google Maps Platform

If life is 10% what happens and 90% how you react, Brandon Winfield, CEO and Co-Founder of iAccess Life, is an exemplar of how to respond to difficult situations. When Brandon underwent an unforeseeable life change, he quickly realized how poorly designed the world around him was for wheelchair users. His decision to change this is having a chain reaction throughout the disabled community.

"After my injury, I realized quickly that places were not made equally in terms of accessibility, and places not designed for wheelchair users made me feel like a burden to the people I went out with," Winfield says. "I knew there had to be a way to help improve these places in a productive and fun way."

And so, he came up with a solution: a lifestyle app, created with Co-Founder and Chief Innovation Product Officer Sayeed Mehrjerdian, that allows users to research, rate, and review public places based on four pillars of accessibility, which are parking, entrance, bathrooms, and interior spaces. Built on Google Maps Platform, the app makes it easier for physically disabled people to make plans with family and friends, and find places where they can easily enjoy a space and have fun.

Accessing leading location technology

The choice to build the app on Google Maps Platform came as easily to Mehrjerdian as the idea for the app itself came to Winfield.

"I didn't even have to make a decision," says Mehrjerdian. "The minute you know you're building an app that has location as its underlying feature, you know it has to be built on Google Maps Platform."

The iAccess Life duo worked with KiwiTech, a startup-focused tech developer, to build the app using Places API. Everything within the app, from the category list—to map view—to the location database, is based on this framework. When users search for a place in the app, Place Autocomplete provides name or address predictions, while Place IDs allow the team to attribute each user rating back to a specific location. The app is built on the Maps SDK for Android and the Maps SDK for iOS.

The time from start to launch took four months. During development, iAccess Life was selected as a recipient of the Google for Startups Latino Founders Fund. "Our goal is to continue to refine our product and leverage native Google Maps Platform features to solve more pain points our users face every day. The Google for Startups Latino Founders Fund gives us the backing and validation we need to keep iterating and provide better accessibility tools to those who need it," says Winfield.

"Our app is infinitely more powerful by being built on Google Maps Platform," says Mehrjerdian. "Google has done all the legwork to provide everything our app needs."

Since its launch in 2019, iAccess Life has gained 7,000 active accounts and 15,000 guest users across all 50 states in the USA, and in 30 countries. The app now has 8,000 unique locations rated, 30,000 total ratings, and 6,000 reviews, with 20% of users leaving a rating and 15% of users writing a review.

Building an all-inclusive, accessible world

Winfield and Mehrjerdian recognize that their app has limitations, but they continue to add new features to solve more of their users' pain points. Users can tap for directions to the places they want to go, and the iAccess Life app will transport them over to the Google Maps app for navigation. The most recent iteration allows users to pay for parking directly in the app, further simplifying the experience of going out. Prospective versions of the app will include information that is more relevant to other forms of disabilities such as vision impairments, hearing impairments, autism, and more.

"iAccess Life can become more than a rating and review platform. We want to become an all-inclusive platform for accessibility," Winfield says. "Whether they're going out in their hometown or traveling abroad, people will be able to come to our app for everything from parking to car rentals and more. Through our collaboration with Google Maps Platform, we can amplify what feels like a niche market solution to benefit a broader community."

Mehrjerdian and Winfield see their app as an opportunity to take accessibility mainstream. iAccess Life’s user base can expand beyond people with disabilities to include their family, friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.

“I met people in rehabilitation who had kind of given up on living a normal life, or having fun, or being a part of a community,” Winfield says. “I wanted to show them that there are so many places you go and there are so many lives to be lived. This app is a way to focus less on what you can’t do and more on what you can.”