Accessible app of the organisation Bundesverband Kinderhospiz e.V.

The children’s hospice organisation Bundesverband Kinderhospiz e.V. aims to develop an accessible app in cooperation with a participation expert and an IT expert. With the app, families with a terminally ill child, children’s hospices and interested individuals can receive important and up-to-date information and opportunities for exchange in a simple and intuitive way.

Why are you a strong team?

Our team builds on the fact that many employees at Bundesverband Kinderhospiz e.V. (BVKH) have experience of disability and barriers – sometimes even at first hand. Valentin Khan-Blouki, a Master’s student in IT at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), is dedicated to developing functions that enable accessibility for all. Guido Roth at BVKH assists with the system operation. Through regular feedback sessions, we ensure that the app we want to develop will actually make help people.

Explain your idea in three sentences.

We are developing an app platform to provide important information and networking opportunities for families with a terminally ill child, children’s hospices and anyone else who is interested. The app should be as accessible as possible; well-designed features should make it easier to use for people with a wide range of disabilities. We want to document the source code for these features and publish it as open source code in order to enable its use by other app developers.

What makes your idea special?

One special feature is that we are implementing common accessibility features (e.g. read-aloud texts) with the new Flutter development kit by Google. More and more developers are opting for Flutter, and our open source code will hopefully make it even easier to develop accessible apps. We also want to promote innovation by developing an AI tool for the automatic generation of sign language videos to reduce the level of effort required for their production.

What are the next steps?

As of March 2022, we have developed a prototype of the mobile app and the backend. After a couple of final steps, we will soon be releasing an initial version of the app for iOS and Android. We will then continuously update the app and equip it with more elaborate features, such as support for sign language videos. We will also regularly publish code on GitHub as well as explanatory online articles in order to facilitate its use by other developers.