He wanted his grandma to enjoy eating out, so he made an app making cities more accessible

Second from the left is Dr. Chong-Wey Lin, founder of Our City Love. Photo credit: Pioneers Post.

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with Speak Up Asia where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with Asian entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Dr. Chong-Wey Lin is the founder of Our City Love, a social enterprise that is using crowdsourcing to help cities become more accessible for the differently abled. He has a group of people going around Taiwan using a special app and uploading how they feel about different aspects of the city.

They answer questions like “Is a restaurant or washroom accessible?” So if you need these services, instead of going to that restaurant to see if it works for you, you can check the app and know whether certain parts of the city are accessible to you or not.

Who are the people you employ?

We hire and train disabled people as our fellows because you know that, based on their life experiences, they are the people who know the accessible environment the best. We hire and train them to collect this accessibility information in our cities and then use a call platform and the mobile application to push this information to everyone.

So if you want to go out, let’s say you want to go out for dinner with your grandfather or grandmother, then it will be much easier for you to find where the accessible and friendly restaurants are and what kind of service they will provide.

That will make your dinner more comfortable and make your grandparents more willing to go out with you.

What was the inspiration for this program?

I was actually raised by my grandmother because my father passed away at a very early age and my mom had to work. So, most of my childhood was spent with my grandmother.

But as I grew up, my grandmother was getting older. And when I used to ask her to go out for dinner saying, “Hey grandma, I want to take you to a restaurant.” Mostly, my grandmother would say, “You go alone. I prefer to stay at home because I don’t want to go out.” At that time, I always thought she didn’t like me. But gradually, I understood that the true problem was that she didn’t really want to bother us because it’s so uncomfortable and inconvenient for us to have to hold her and pick up her wheelchair.

My grandmother is also vegetarian. In our hometown, there is a very famous and good vegetarian restaurant. They also give 60 percent discounts to people who are older than 65 years old. My grandmother loves the food there. But the problem is that they have more than 20 or 30 steps at the front gate. So, when we go there, I have to carry her and bring her up the stairs to the restaurant. That’s why she doesn’t really want to go out with us.

We thought, “What if we could share this information on our mobile application to my grandmother and say, ‘Now you see? Today I’m going to bring you to a more accessible restaurant where you can have your accessible toilet and go to the toilet on your own’?” Then that will make her more willing to go out with me.

That was the original reason why we wanted to design these services.

What are some of the challenges in developing the app? 

We’re still trying to develop different technical services. For example, we started to focus more on web services so you don’t need to download any mobile applications anymore. Just Google it or use your Siri.

We’re doing this so that the user interfaces or the services will be more comfortable for everyone. The elderly or the people who are differently abled can simply use voice command to get the information that they need. So, from a technical standpoint, we’re still improving.

What do you think is the future for accessibility in cities?