Travel Hands for PC

Travel Hands charity relieves the needs of people with visual impairments by facilitating safe, convenient, and inexpensive outdoor travel so they can attend formal appointments, recreational activities and community events.

Travel Hands App is designed to ease the outdoor commute of VIP (Visually Impaired People) by pairing them with sighted & verified volunteers to walk together to similar destinations ensuring a safe, convenient, and inexpensive travel experience. The app can be easily used by a VIP using screen reader software or zoom functions. The web based application and mobile app have been designed following the WCAG 2.1 accessibility guidelines and following user research and testing with our VIP community.

With Travel Hands, a VIP can submit a trip request that is automatically sent to a volunteer near them, alerting the volunteer to their location. The accepting volunteer will then come and pick the VIP up and walk towards the requested destination.

The VIP pay a small fee per journey to get to travel safely, inexpensively and independently outdoors. Volunteers help VIP in a flexible way and walk more. They are vetted by the Enhanced Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS) and trained with our online or in person course.

In the near future, as a Thank You, our volunteers will be rewarded with incentives that can be redeemed from our app. The distance walked with VIP is converted to points, points then converted to goodies as incentives from affiliated companies.

The challenge we are solving
Travelling safely, cheaply, and independently is incredibly challenging for the 285 million VIP across the world. Covid-19 has made it even more challenging for them to move around in the city as they might require physical assistance to navigate.

In London, travelling for a VIP usually ends up twice as expensive as for a sighted person on the same route. TfL has shared that 84% of disabled Londoners report that their disability limits their ability to travel. TfL Staff provide great support inside the station to the VIP. But, it is difficult for them to drop the VIP to the bus stop next road due to less staff presence. In this scenario, if VIP don't get any other help, majority end up paying a £2.40 taxi ride. A report on the research can be accessed here: http://bit.ly/36Xq4oQ

Progress
The service launched in May 2021 in London in the form of a call centre. We have completed 350+ journeys and signed up 170 Visually Impaired People (VIP) with 70+ active volunteers and 2 charities paying for the service. This has helped us to gain experience and validate major assumptions to build the mobile app to scale further. The algorithm of the mobile app is created from learnings and feedback from these journeys.

Travel Hands Impact
Travel Hands enables the VIP community to have a safe outdoor travelling experience from end to end. With 350+ journeys conducted in London as a call centre, the service has proven to save 30 minutes for every journey undertaken and £40 on travel costs per month as compared to pre-pandemic statistics for an active VIP in London. VIP are encouraged to be more physically active, and improve social interactions to avoid loneliness. We are reducing the stress of other charities working for the benefit of VIP as they can pre-plan and provide on-time means of alternate transportation.