AccessMap

Most buildings do not know whether they are accessible, because finding out is a pain.

AccessMap was started by a founder whose reason for building it comes out of her own family. She tells that story better than we could, so we will not tell it here.

We came in as CTO and co-founder.

The problem underneath it is dull and that is why nothing has fixed it. Accessibility rules are real and getting stricter. Nova Scotia’s Built Environment Accessibility Standard landed in April 2026. Federal law sets a 2040 deadline. But finding out whether a building actually complies means a person walking around with a tape measure, writing things on a clipboard, and typing it up afterward.

That is slow enough that it mostly does not happen. So buildings do not know. And you cannot fix what nobody measured.

The decision that shaped the product

We could have built a checklist app. Almost everyone does. You walk around, tap boxes, get a report.

We built measurement instead.

A door is either wide enough or it is not, and that is a number. If you can get the number from a photo taken on a phone, the whole job changes. It stops being a specialist visit and becomes something a staff member does in an afternoon.

So we built a computer vision service that works out real distances from a phone photo, using OpenCV, ArUco markers, and solvePnP for the geometry. Door widths, ramp lengths, corridor widths, from a picture.

That is harder than a checklist and it is the only part of this that is difficult to copy.

What else we built

A compliance dashboard that uses Google Gemini to read photos of a space and produce a report against the actual standard, rather than a generic score. A Flutter app for Android so the measuring can be done on site. AWS underneath, React on the front, Node and Express for the API, Python and FastAPI for the vision service.

Where it is now

In development, with a design partner in the accessibility space. Not finished, and we would rather say that than dress it up.