Deine Rechte
A mobile app that makes Austrian federal law readable for people without a law degree
The problem
Every Austrian federal law is public and free to read in the RIS, the government's legal information system. It is also written and laid out for lawyers. Someone who wants to know how much deposit a landlord may ask for has to know which law the answer lives in before they can even search for it.
The approach
The app starts from life, not from the statute book: areas like housing, work and shopping, each with the questions people actually ask, and every question leads straight to the paragraph that answers it. The text itself is never copied in — it comes live from the RIS open data API, through a client that queues requests to stay inside the interface's limit of one every two seconds, and a parser that turns the RIS XML into paragraphs, enumerations and headings. Reading mode is the one loud screen: the paragraph number at 96 pixels and a violet stamp showing the real date the provision came into force. To introduce it there is a 60-second film that was not recorded but built as HTML and rendered frame by frame, all 3,600 of them.
The result
This one is not finished. What exists today is the design demo the real app will be built from, running on Android and iOS against live data, plus the film that explains it. Still in the works are the pieces the film already shows: comparing two versions of a paragraph word for word, and a timeline of when a law changed.
What mattered
- Law text is fetched live from the official source, so it cannot go stale in the app
- The validity stamp shows a real in-force date from the RIS, not decoration
- The film is code: change a line of text or a cut point and render it again