Name: equalizent Social Franchise GmbH

My startup in a nutshell 

We are a company that creates and distributes educational media for deaf people and for learning sign language. As a spin-off of equalizent Schulungs- und Beratungs GmbH in Vienna, we have over 20 years of experience in the field of sign language and education. Our sister company Sign Time from Vienna provides us with the technical know-how to implement sign language in electronic media.

The project with the ContentShift Accelerator is about developing a service that integrates sign language tooltips into e-books. Terms that are difficult for the deaf to understand are explained in sign language and provided as an animated video. This should make all books easier for the deaf to understand, which will also enable publishers to meet the requirements of the Accessibility Act from June 2025.

Our Team: 

Our core team consists of the founders Monika Haider and Georg Tschare, as well as our employees Corina Malicek and Thomas Pickel.

Monika and Georg are also the founders of equalizent Vienna and Sign Time and share the management responsibilities. They have many years of experience in planning and implementing projects related to sign language.

Corina and Thomas have been with us for many years and are highly skilled in the realisation of sign language projects. While Thomas' strengths lie in project management and process design, Corina provides technical and graphic support.

In addition, we have access to over 60 employees in our sister companies equalizent Vienna and Sign Time, who we can call upon as needed. These include translators, teachers, technicians and educationalists.

Our Founding Story: 

The company equalizent Social Franchise was founded to market the know-how and materials developed over a period of 20 years in our training company equalizent Vienna throughout Europe. This is done on the one hand through a franchise system for educational institutions, and on the other hand through the direct distribution of individual educational media such as online sign language courses, children's books in sign language or sex education materials for deaf teenagers and young adults.

From then on, it was a logical step to turn our attention to books. Since we have the expertise and the assets (dictionaries in animated sign language), we want to be the first to combine these resources with e-books and thus open up the world of books to the deaf.

This is how our business idea transforms the content industry: 

For deaf people, learning to read is a difficult process. Since written language is an abstract form of spoken language and deaf people have no access to spoken language, it is difficult for them to develop reading skills that enable them to read books with comprehension.

At the same time, the legal framework for accessibility is becoming increasingly strict. The Barrierefreiheitsstärkungsgesetz (Barrier-Free Accessibility Act), the German implementation of the European Accessibility Act, will come into force in June 2025 and, among other things, requires that e-books must also be barrier-free. We want to create this accessibility for the target group of the deaf with our solution.

We are doing this by using the technology of tooltips for sign language, which has been proven in e-book readers. With existing e-book readers, it has long been possible to look up individual words, e.g. in a foreign-language book, in a dictionary, an encyclopaedia or on Wikipedia.

Our solution extends these possibilities by enabling individual words to be looked up in a sign language dictionary. Instead of a text window, as with conventional tooltips, a video window opens and the term looked up is explained in sign language.

Provided that the software works and that comprehensive sign language dictionaries are available, our tooltip can be used at very low marginal costs. We therefore expect that our technology will become the standard for accessible e-books and establish itself on the market following a successful market launch.