#StartupsEverywhere Profile: Brandon Winfield, Founder & CEO, iAccess Innovations
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Creating Space to Share Accessibility Challenges, Plan Travel Confidently
Brandon Winfield is the Founder & CEO of Atlanta-based iAccess Innovations. After facing his own challenges finding spaces that would be accessible to his own mobility range, he decided to build a space where people with disabilities could share their accessibility experiences with public businesses and spaces. We spoke to Brandon about his journey building his company, the challenges of moderating user content as a small platform, and his company’s work to train other businesses on disability etiquette and inclusion.
Tell us about your background. What led you to iAccess Innovations? What is the work you all are doing through your platform iAccess Life?
I grew up racing motocross very competitively at a young age and ended up getting hurt when I was 14 years old. Through my rehabilitation process, I got back to living a normal life. I wanted to stay the same person—I've always been very independent and like doing things on my own, love going on dates, and hanging out with friends.
But as I traveled outside of my little bubble, I started to realize that there was a lack of accessibility from place to place. Whether it was the parking, the entrance, or, most importantly, the bathroom, places that are inaccessible are a big issue for somebody in a wheelchair. I got tired of feeling like a burden to the people that I traveled with. And I had this feeling that there had to be a better way of letting people know where to go before they actually get there.
With iAccess Innovations, we built a mobile application that allows people to rate, review, and research how accessible places are—from the parking to the bathroom, the entrance, and the interior spaces. It's for our community by our community—essentially, we're a crowdsourcing application. We highly encourage people to leave feedback about their experiences instead of trying to provide feedback on what they think somebody else will experience. This is important because everybody's experience is different. You could be in a push wheelchair and be paralyzed the same way I am, but the way that we get around can be different. I could be a little bit more agile in my chair than you are which enables me to make things work differently. Or you could be in a power chair and not have the same kind of access that somebody in a push wheelchair would have. It's good to know this information before you go and we aim to allow people peace of mind when they travel, adventure, and go new places.
The iAccess Life platform relies on users adding their own reviews about the accessibility of different locations. What would it mean for your company if current legal frameworks for intermediaries, such as Section 230 or the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, were altered?
We're a small organization, and we don't have the attorneys, the money, or other resources to try and keep up with what every user says in real-time. We're still trying to build out our platform, and do not have a system to moderate posts or any proactive moderation yet. Our terms of service instruct users to be productive with their feedback, build people up, and let them know what they can do better. We hope everybody's saying the right things and doing good things. But we can only do so much while we’re getting off the ground and can’t be responsible for everything each of our users says. We want companies to be paying attention to accessibility, and if we had to constantly focus on moderating content, it would stop us from growing and getting the traction that we need for big organizations of the world to take notice of us. And it would hurt us a lot if we had to deal with legal action from companies that did not like a review they got.
As a startup, you are grinding for every dollar. I built something that is supposed to be altruistic and help people to know where to go and where not to go. It takes a lot of time and effort to raise money. And when that funding comes through the door we want to focus it on creating value for our customers and find new ways to bring in revenue. We do not want to have to focus that money on a defense attorney retainer. We like to think that everybody who comes to our platform is there for the right reasons and to do the right things. So far, we haven't gotten any feedback from somebody saying, there are people using hate speech on this or anything of that nature. I know as we grow and get bigger, those things will become a concern. But at this moment we don't have the resources to focus on moderation all the time.
I understand iAccess Innovations is located at Atlanta Tech Village. Could you tell us about Atlanta Tech Village, and what it has meant to you to be a part of that community?
The founder of Atlanta Tech Village, David Cummings, sold his own startup for a good chunk of change and decided to start building up the tech ecosystem in Atlanta where it didn't really exist at the time. He built a big, what I like to call, playground (actually a building) that operates as a sort of incubator for startups to foster their growth and provide space to work. Once companies grow to a certain size, they graduate out of the Village—graduates include companies like Calendly, Yik Yak, and Bitpay. They also have Pre-Accelerator and Women + Tech programs that are designed to help minority and women founders connect to capital, community, and resources.
I always drove by the Village—this big, beautiful building—and wanted to be in there and be part of that tech ecosystem. And, after starting to think about my own startup, I got to go through their founder program and then I was asked to come back and help lead that program. So now I'm in the midst of my third cohort with the program. It's a 16-week curriculum and we usually have eight different startup founders. Through this, I get to foster relationships with new founders and I try to help give them the best opportunity to succeed. Somewhere in the neighborhood of 90 percent of startups fail within the first few years, and we give these people a better opportunity to beat those odds. We give them resources that they may not have otherwise and connect them to the mentors and advisors they need.
You have convened disability etiquette and inclusivity trainings—can you tell us a little bit about those—what are they and why are they important?
I started by building our mobile application. And as things have started to scale out, I wanted to center our company as experts in the disability and accessibility space. Our team saw these trainings as a way to get in front of bigger organizations and work with Diversity & Inclusion teams to help them think about access. We provide an in-person training that centers around this rubric of people-first language and identity-first language. What we try to do is get the managers and customer-facing employees comfortable with interacting and dealing with different types of visible and invisible disabilities, so they know how to approach and accommodate this community. We want employees to feel comfortable offering assistance instead of just turning a blind eye or thinking I don't know what to do or say. We think it's a great way to get people accustomed and acclimated to the different people they may interact with through their work.
Are there any local, state, or federal startup issues that you think should receive more attention from policymakers?
Not off the top of my head. I hadn’t previously thought about it much. I didn't know that there were all these ways that policies impact my ability to build my startup. As a founder, you spend all your time thinking about how to grow and build your company, it’s hard to devote time or energy towards these issues that seem out of sight a lot of the time.
What are your goals for iAccess Innovations moving forward?
We want to onboard more users onto the application. The whole journey started off with focusing on letting people know where they can travel independently and confidently. The goal is still to shine a light on people with disabilities going out and living their life to the fullest. The best way for us to continue to do that is by sharing our platform with more people. We will also be launching a B2B product that allows people to scan QR codes at the point of service, collect accessibility feedback in real-time, compile that into a list, and send it off as a report to the company or the city. We think this will allow people to have the chance to make real change and be proactive instead of reactive. So that's where we want to continue to grow and become a more mainstream tool where people know iAccess Life as the place to learn about accessibility.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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