The story
David Sirota's father has FSHD — facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy. Every dinner out, every weekend trip, every birthday started the same way: a phone call to the host. Is there a step? Can a chair fit between the tables? What about the restroom?
Most of the time, the answer was a guess. Sometimes the guess was wrong. The drive happened, the chair got stuck at the door, the night ended in the car.
Google Maps has an accessibility checkbox. It's binary, often years out of date, and tells you nothing useful. A venue clicked it in 2019. The owner sold the place in 2022. The new owner renovated and added three steps. The checkbox is still checked.
So we built ROLLIN. Not a checkbox. A score. Six features per venue, weighted by what actually decides whether someone with access needs can be in the room — verified by the disability community itself: wheelchair users, walker and cane users, families with strollers, and people with sensory needs. Living data, not a static dataset. The score evolves as places change — because places change.
