What tools is Independo planning for the future?

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Around 240 million people worldwide live with cognitive disabilities, who often have difficulty reading and/or writing.

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The majority of them long for more independence: to be able to do things themselves, to take care of themselves, to manage appointments independently and to 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.

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The calendar app should 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 when reading and/or writing. By working closely with the target group and using 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 have the opportunity to independently manage their digital calendar based on icons.

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Reaching the next milestone with a netidee: the Independo Maps app

Now that we have recognized the added value of the calendar for the target group, we would now like to use our accumulated knowledge to apply the translation algorithm in other areas as well and make a further contribution to independence. Road maps are often backed with small symbols or texts and are therefore difficult or impossible to access for people with learning difficulties. We are therefore very pleased that Netidee gave us the opportunity to develop an overlay for Leaflet. The overlay equips road maps with standardized pictograms and is developed as a plugin. This should enable as many software development teams as possible to build inclusive software solutions themselves, which are also accessible to people with learning difficulties.