Mr Holger Dieterich
Holger is a designer by education and worked as a Product Manager for startups and Coach for startup accelerator programs. With his friend Raul Krauthausen he founded Wheelmap.org, the world's largest online map to find and rate wheelchair accessible places. With Sozialhelden he's also responsible for consulting companies in (digital) inclusion and inclusive co-creation processes.
Solution - Wheelmap
We propose an open standard to describe the accessibility of places. Are there steps at the entrance of this school? Is there an accessible toilet at this library? Are assistance dogs welcome at this university? Our project Wheelmap and 79 partners have collected more than 1.3 million answers in the past years on Accessibility Cloud.
Now we need to help software developers use this information within their services like hotel booking platforms, school directories and tourism websites, to bring the information to the mainstream. We pursue to extend the Semantic Web standard schema.org with accessibility criteria. Over 10 million sites use Schema.org, including Google, Microsoft, Pinterest, Yandex and others.