From an interview with Idan Meir
The Problem: When Compliance Is Not Communication
RightHear was founded, Meir explains, on a clear conviction. “Spatial independence is a human right.” That belief came from recognizing a persistent gap between legal accessibility requirements and the lived experience of blind and low vision visitors.
Under the ADA, venues are required to provide “Effective Communication.” In practice, Meir says, the industry has relied heavily on Braille as the default solution, even though it often fails to meet that standard.
“Fewer than 10 percent of the blind community reads Braille,” Meir says. Even when Braille signage exists, locating it can be more difficult than reading it. “If a message cannot be found or read, the communication is not ‘effective.’”
“We believe that if a venue has a Braille sign, it must have a Talking Sign to truly fulfill the ADA’s mandate,”
Idan Meir
That disconnect led RightHear to rethink what accessibility communication should look like in real environments. “We believe that if a venue has a Braille sign, it must have a Talking Sign to truly fulfill the ADA’s mandate,” Meir explains.
RightHear addresses this by transforming physical spaces into an audible interface. “We are not helping venues check a compliance box,” Meir says. “We are making sure they are genuinely communicating with 100 percent of their visitors.”
Time for Change
RightHear is no longer an experimental solution. “We have moved way beyond proof of concept,” Meir says, noting that the platform is now widely deployed across top-tier travel destinations.
The technology is active in airports and hotels, but Meir points to parks and nature reserves as a defining area of leadership. “Everyone deserves to experience the outdoors,” he says, “yet nature trails are often the most difficult environments to navigate blindly.”
RightHear is currently deployed in parks around the world, allowing users to self-navigate trails while accessing wayfinding and educational content through their phones. “Users do not need to touch physical surfaces,” Meir explains, which is particularly important in outdoor and high-traffic environments.
More about our work in parks can be found here.
Putting Accessibility Within Reach
Affordability is central to RightHear’s strategy. “Our mission is to make accessibility the standard, not the exception,” Meir says.
Compared to physical infrastructure changes, RightHear is designed to be a cost-effective and scalable solution for venues of any size. The company offers a flexible subscription model that allows destinations to implement the technology immediately.
“Our pricing starts at $360 a year for a very small facility,” Meir notes. The goal, he says, is to remove cost as a barrier so venues can focus on delivering meaningful accessibility rather than minimum compliance.
For Meir, the distinction is clear. “If communication is not usable, it is not accessible,” he says. RightHear’s approach reframes accessibility as an operational and guest experience priority, not just a regulatory requirement.
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