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Celebrating South Asian Heritage Month

South Asian Heritage Month (SAHM) started in 2020 and runs every year from 18th July – 17th of August. SAHM is an opportunity to celebrate South Asian history, culture, and communities. The term ‘South Asian’ was introduced in the ’80s to encompass people with roots in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Understanding culture through the power of story-telling allows a chance to explore the South Asian community and identity in the 21st century whilst reflecting back on historical movements that shape South Asian Heritage.

Celebrations at Transreport

This month at Transreport, to celebrate South Asian Heritage Month, we dedicated our Diversity and Inclusion Forum which takes place with all colleagues on the last Friday of every month.

Our Diversity and Inclusion Forum launched last month in July where we covered Pride and looked at LGBTQ+ rights across the globe followed by some discussions about how we can support colleagues and be an ally within the workplace. At Transreport, 25% of our colleagues have shared that they are South Asian so we always knew that this would be an exciting time for internal celebrations and we wanted to join in with the 2023 theme of ‘Stories to Tell’.

‘Stories to Tell’

On Friday 28th July we had the privilege of hearing from one of our QA Engineers Shilpa Awasthi who shared her story for the 2023 theme ‘Stories to Tell’.

Shilpa shared with us photographs and stories of finding a community of like-minded people when moving to the UK and discussed how she celebrates a range of festivals with friends. A popular point of discussion was around South Asian food and culinary influences! When asked why she thought it was important to celebrate South Asian Heritage Month Shilpa said:

‘to better understand one another, I thought South Asian Heritage Month was very important, considering I am South Asian myself. Having this opportunity to get to know each other better made me happy to be involved.’

A huge thank you to Shilpa for sharing her story with us.

If you have any stories that you’d like to share with us then please do get in touch with us through our social channels, we’d love to hear from you!

We were finalists at the Apple Design Awards!

The team here at Transreport are thrilled to announce that we were officially named as finalists in the ‘Inclusivity’ category at the 2023 Apple Design Awards. Being nominated for this award is an honour in itself and a testament to all the hard work that our team has put into the development of the Passenger Assistance app. We are so proud and honoured to have been nominated in this category alongside so many other great apps. To discover the rest of the categories in this year’s awards and to find out more about our fellow finalists, head over to Apple’s official website. 

We want to take this opportunity to thank Apple for acknowledging our continued efforts on our app’s impact on improving accessibility. This nomination is not just an achievement for our team, it’s a celebration of the power of inclusive design in the tech industry. The inclusivity category is about creating a great experience for all by supporting people from a diversity of backgrounds, abilities, and languages. 

What is the Passenger Assistance app, and what does it do? Our team believes that everyone should be able to travel spontaneously and have the independence and flexibility they desire. That’s why we created the Passenger Assistance app, a bridge to simplify assisted travel. We developed a travel app for disabled and older people that allows users to easily request and book assistance for rail journeys. This recognition by Apple serves as a powerful affirmation of our team’s collective efforts and the impact that our app has had in creating a meaningful product that resonates with our users. 

We would like to say a huge congratulations to our fellow nominees and those nominated in all other categories and a huge congratulations to Universe — Website Builder by Universe Exploration on winning the award in our category! Becoming a finalist is a huge achievement and a significant milestone on our journey. While it is called the ‘Design’ award, it’s essential to recognise that design encompasses much more than just visual elements. It encompasses concepts, mentality, user experience, code, and so much more.

Our team are currently at the Apple headquarters in Cupertino. Our Accessibility and Inclusion manager, Emma, has her assistance dog Luna who is pictured above.

We’ve been nominated for a Scope Disability Equality award!

Every year, Scope runs the ‘Scope Disability Equality awards’ where they “recognise and celebrate the achievements of people who; campaign for disability equality and bring about social change”. There are various categories with nominees such as ‘media moment’ which is an award that recognises a moment involving disabled people that really had a powerful impact on encouraging disability equality, and ‘young campaigner’ which is aimed at recognising a young disabled person who is speaking out and taking action on issues that they believe in, and many more categories. 

Here at Transreport, we are so thrilled to announce that this year, the Passenger Assistance app has been nominated under ‘Accessible Organisation’. As a company that has aimed to create an app that works to simplify travel for disabled people, giving more spontaneity and making booking rail assistance easier, we are incredibly proud that this work is being acknowledged alongside so many other great companies such as AccessAble and Nimbus Disability: The Access Card. 

Companies such as AccessAble are huge in the disability/accessibility world! Their app allows disabled people to research any accessibility information on locations and venues beforehand and assess whether it is accessible enough. Every venue has been checked in person by a trained surveyor. Another company nominated under the same category as us is Nimbus Disability, another great app for disabled people. The Access Card is used by more than 30,000 disabled people at major UK venues such as Alton towers and Buckingham palace. You can see the full list of nominees on the Scope website! 

Judging for the awards takes place throughout the 18th-22nd of July and although not all the categories are open for public voting, we wanted to share the great news with all of our app users!

The judges this year are a range of high-profile disabled people with a range of expertise and each are in charge of judging their own categories. For example, Samantha Renke is an actress, presenter and disability rights campaigner and is judging the ‘Accessible Organisation’ and ‘Young Campaigner’ categories. Another judge on this year’s panel is Dan Edge, a performer and activist and is judging the ‘Campaign’ and ‘Role model’ categories. There are over 15 judges and 9 categories this year, all with very deserving nominees! The winners are expected to be announced this Autumn so we’re super excited to find out the results and share it with you all.