Mapping the Disability Tech Market with Perkins School for the Blind

SANDY: So as Cameron said, my name is Sandy Lacey. I am a just turned 40-year-old woman. I have brown hair. I'm wearing green glasses.

A brown blazer. Jeans. And I am here to talk to you about what we're building at Perkins, with regards to creating innovation and coalescing and convening folks around this concept of disability tech. I want to thank my hosts, and I also just want to ask my colleagues who are here in the room, if you could just raise your hands.

I'm not here alone. I have my four colleagues here. So afterwards, if you want to talk to someone from Perkins, feel free to go find one of them as well. All right.

So before we dive into the Howe Innovation Center, I want to talk really quickly about our namesake, Samuel Gridley Howe. On the slide is a painting from the 1800s, of a white man with brown hair, green eyes, and a white popped collar. This is Samuel Gridley Howe, a founding director of Perkins. He was truly a visionary for his time.

Howe believed that people with disabilities should be fully integrated into mainstream society. And for the 1830s, this was a radical idea. He was a social entrepreneur. So he found the first students for the school.

He found the first teachers for the school. And as we say in the start-up world, he really took the school from zero to one. He also was an innovator in both teaching methodologies and in technology. So Howe actually educated a woman named Laura Bridgeman, who we believe was the first deafblind woman to receive a formal education, and he in his spare time developed Boston Line Type, a novel tactile language and a precursor to Braille.

So we thought it was only fitting that we named our Innovation Center after Howe. Because it is Women's History Month, I would be remiss if I didn't mention his wife, Julia Ward Howe as well. She was a force in her own right. She was an Abolitionist and ran an anti-slavery newspaper.

And she is the author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. So there you go. Let's advance and talk a little bit about what the Howe Innovation Center is. So really what we want to do at Perkins through this initiative is connect the community of people with disabilities with innovators around the world.

And when I say community of people with disabilities, I mean all disabilities. Not just visual impairment. 50% of our students at Perkins with a visual impairment have a second disability. And we've been working around the world for 200 years with people with multiple disabilities.

And so we really wouldn't be serving our community if we focused solely on visual impairments. So this is really an initiative across all disability communities. And we've started with research. Now, I'm gonna put a pin in it.

Because we're gonna talk so much about this, our starting point. And I'm just gonna move on to the other three areas of focus at Howe. The first is we really want to amplify the lived experience. So there are really sticky and persistent problems in daily living, education, and employment that the disability community deeply understands those problem points, but maybe innovators aren't aware of them.

And so if we can use Perkins to help amplify and crowdsource those problem statements, and make them easily accessible to the innovative community out there, we might be able to channel well-intentioned entrepreneurial activity to the top problem statements that the community wants to see people working on. We really want to help entrepreneurs as well. So common problems that entrepreneurs face... Finding capital.

To get invested into their companies. Finding customers for primary market research and user testing. Getting your product deployed out into the real world for feedback on how it works when it's out in the wild. These are things that we believe we can build programming around.

So that we can help entrepreneurs get co-designed products to market. And then finally we're also gonna do that by building a community beyond the community of people with disabilities and entrepreneurs. We want to bring investors -- whether it's angel investors, grant writers, VCs, we want to bring them to the table. We want to bring academic institutions to the table.

These are students of engineering, design, business. Make them aware of what disability technology is, and help them get plugged into opportunities. We also believe that universities have cutting edge technologies that could be applied to accelerate accessibility, and we can help plug them in. I want to give a shoutout right now to Olin College of Engineering.

We've already entered into a partnership with them. Some of their students are helping us visualize the data from our database, so that it would be accessible, so we're already kind of marching down this path. And then finally big tech companies, large corporates, that care about DEIA, that care about accessibility and inclusion, we want to partner with them as well. So now that we've talked about who we're named after, and what we're doing, I want to talk about the research that we've developed, and where this can possibly take us.

So this is just the tip of the iceberg. When I came to Perkins, about a year ago, I'm a former analyst. And so I started trying to figure out who was active within the space. And I found really amazing incubator and accelerator programs focused on disability tech globally.

Like, ATS Labs. Remarkable -- just to name a few. And I found that the research, though, was really tough for me to get a handle on. There were, like, market maps and market research for walkers, wheelchairs, canes, and mobility aids.

Or digital accessibility. And the market there. But I couldn't find any sort of market map around start-ups that were leveraging cutting edge technologies to make the world accessible. So I thought...

Let's build it! So I made a really ugly database in Excel. And I'm proud to say that now it has over 750 companies in it. You know, just to briefly say the difference between disability tech and assistive technology is that I believe assistive tech is a major component of disability tech, but it's not all of it.

So the example I like to give is... An inclusive employment start-up. It's definitely going to increase accessibility for people with disabilities, if it is accessible, but it's not an assistive technology, helping somebody increase their function. So it's actually a broader market.

And I want to add that we're really building this in public. So I'm taking that start-up concept of build in public. And if you have thoughts and ideas as to the language or the taxonomy that we're using, I want to hear from you and partner with you. And build this together.

So once we had the 750 companies, I started cataloging them, according to the community of people with disabilities the company is trying to serve. So is this building for people with visual impairments? People with mobility disabilities? Across 8 different disabilities?

And then 18 different disability innovation themes. And this is where it starts to get really interesting. So GDI Hub is a phenomenal group in the UK. And they had already developed a taxonomy around how you could innovate in the space of disability.

So when something is perfect, adopt it. And so they have self-care. Travel. Navigation.

Communication. Inclusive employment. These are the types of categories that disability innovation themes would touch. And then in partnership with a wonderful Perkins volunteer -- we have a very robust volunteer program, and are always looking for volunteers -- I developed a technology taxonomy.

And this is where it gets kind of really heady, I would say. But themes, categories, and subcategories. So for the first time, we can actually query this database and say: Show me all companies innovating for the visually impaired in the space of navigation using computer vision and haptics. And it will spit out the companies that fit those criteria.

We've also started to add the investors. Who they are and how much money they've put into this space. The geography. Where are the companies located.

And the product status. You know, is this company shipping a product? Is it still in R and D? Did they close?

Because some of these companies have already started and folded. And we've been able to see some really cool trends now. I want to shout out to Dylan, who really put the meat on the database. He's in the audience right now.

And that was a tough job. But... Two people had to do it, and it was me and him. So this is the first insight into what we're gleaning from the sector.

So this is a perceptual market map on the screen. It's a common way that the tech industry looks at activity within a space. And on the slide, there are a bunch of company logos. And they are clustered according to the type of technology that they are.

So these companies are all innovating for just the blind and the visually impaired. So this is not all disabilities right here. This is just for visual impairment. And this is only in the space of navigation.

There are 106 companies trying to crack the nut right now on navigation for the blind and visually impaired. And in size order, the largest grouping is wearables. Think of an Apple Watch, a FitBit. Those are examples of wearables that the general population uses.

In this space, the most common are headsets or glasses. And then following from that, we have other. Which would be wrist wearable, a clip, a ring, a harness. The next active section, or with the most activity, is a wayfinding app, orientation and mobility within a space, and identification apps.

This is really -- tell me what this is that's in front of me. Is this a can of tomato sauce? Or is this a can of soup? For example.

And then smart canes. So trying to bring the white cane... Bring technology to the white cane. The second half of the perceptual market map, because it doesn't fit, is: The most active space here are tactile displays and inclusive employment.

We also have education, travel, mobile phones, keyboards, and digital therapy. And if you like this, I want everybody to know that at the end of my presentation, there's a QR code, where you can scan and you can join our community, and this will be downloaded in an accessible version onto your laptop. So this is just the beginning. So this is a perceptual market map.

We can also start satisfying some trends in geography. So at least 140 companies are based in the US. That's around 40% of the global market is based in the US. Innovating for the visually impaired.

The top five countries are the US, with 141, United Kingdom with 26, Israel with 18, India with 17, and Australia with 16. Now, keep in mind, these are, again, just companies innovating for the blind and visually impaired. So not all disabilities. And 48 countries are home to at least one start-up in this space.

From here, the next slide, we have a vertical bar graph. And this is the top ten companies that have raised over $350 million in the space of visual impairment. With ORCAM, which is an Israel-based wearable that attaches to a pair of glasses -- they've raised the most, with $86.4 million. And then I want to spend a chunk of time on this slide and the following.

So we see most of the activity is in the space of navigation. And that's important. Now, some might think that navigation is only getting from point A to point B. But if you can really get navigation right, you'll start influencing some very thorny problems that persist within the visually impaired community.

Our employment rate is 40%. Which means 60% of people in the US who are blind or visually impaired are not employed. Our college completion rate, 6 out of 10 students with visual impairments who start college do not get a degree. So if you don't feel safe, confident, or comfortable getting from one place to another, it hinders your ability to participate in education and employment.

So I'm really happy to see a lot of activity within this space. Because it has ripple effects in some of the key problem areas that our community faces. Following navigation, we see a lot of activity in custom tablets and mobile devices. As well as tactile design.

And also education and inclusive employment. We can break it down even further now. And this is why I'm kind of obsessed with this database. So the navigation -- we can see how companies are trying to tackle the problem of navigation.

Wearables are the most common method. There are over 35 companies actively trying to develop a wearable device to enable navigation. And glasses are the most common category, with at least 23 start-ups globally, operating within this space. Collectively, these companies have raised $135 million.

And 13 of them are shipping a product. Which to me was very interesting. Because this is a hardware investment -- a hardware company is hard to stand up. So the fact that 13 of the glasses companies have a product that they're currently selling in the market is a pretty high rate of getting something out the door.

But glasses aren't the only type of wearable. As we mentioned before, harnesses, rings, wrist wearables -- they've raised a total of around $14.3 million in financing. And there are at least 15 companies taking this approach. With wrist wearable being the most common.

But we've found two harnesses, a clip, and a ring also. And way finding apps. We have at least 33 start-ups that have an app in the wayfinding space. And they're all taking a variety of different approaches.

Good Maps, which spun out of the American Printing House for the Blind, they closed a $3.5 million seed round last year from a Kentucky-based venture fund. Right Here is an Israeli-based start-up. That is using partnerships and sensor technology to increase accessibility in indoor navigation. And they're being deployed in every McDonalds in Israel right now.

And they just opened up a US office. So there's a lot of activity here. I could go on and on. But for the sake of time, I'm gonna move us along.

And here is where the technology taxonomy comes in. So now we can also see that navigation companies are using a wide variety of technologies, with geofencing and image recognition being the most popular technologies implemented. Some of the companies are using a combination of three or four technologies. So it's not one for each company.

But it's very interesting to see how a lot of these companies are harnessing... You know, attaching on to one technology and really trying to leverage it in the navigation space. So I know that was a lot. But it's just the beginning.

And this is just the first research insight that we've shared. In fact, this is the first public event for the Howe Innovation Center! So I'm really excited about it. Thank you!

And I really just want to say that all ships rise with the tide. A lot of folks have been active within the disability tech ecosystem for a while. And I think that entrepreneurs, accessibility professionals, people with the lived experience of having a disability, any combination thereof... We want to hear from you.

There are so many ways we can work together here. This QR code will take you to a sign-up page, where you will get our research for free. And you'll hear about programming that we roll out. Future speaking engagements that we have, and it will also be a great way to connect with us and help inform us in the direction of things that you would like to see being created for the community.

If this doesn't work for you, also [email protected] is a great way to reach me directly. So I just wanted to thank everyone so much for participating in this tonight. And we've had data. Right?

I've given you this high level overview of data. But now you get to hear the fun stories behind the data. So I've actually invited two folks who have been really helpful to me so far this year, as I've been standing up this initiative. We have Keith Kirkland, who is the chief haptics officer of Wear.Works.

He's gonna talk about true tales as a disability tech entrepreneur. And we have Ron Russo from 5Lion Ventures. He's invested in this space. And he's gonna tell us what it's been like as an investor within the space.

So I'm gonna cede the microphone to Keith. And he's gonna come on up and share the Wear.Works story. Thank you all so much! (applause)

KEITH: Hello, everyone. You're welcome. That was amazing. So much data.

I'm like... Wow! I wish this data was available when we started the company. We could have made so many different choices!

So I appreciate that, and all of the hard work that I'm sure went into scouring the Earth to find all of us technology companies that are focused on trying to make an impact in a disability space. So my name is Keith Kirkland. I'm the co-founder and chief haptic officer of Wear.Works. Haptic means touch, in case you don't know.

Nothing personal. And what we do is we build products and experiences that use the skin as a communications channel to deliver information in a more intuitive and less obtrusive way. Now... We started with the idea of navigation.

Actually, I started with this idea of trying to build a suit that would allow a person to download kung fu and the suit would teach you via vibrations. But we had a sense that navigation had a bigger market. And as we dug into the space, really what we were finding was... A lot of people asked me...

Oh my God. What made you want to work with people who are blind? Do you have a blind family member? I'm like...

No. I never met a person who was blind until I started a company to help people who were blind. Right? And you go...

How do you do that and why do you do that? And our story is very different. It's... We were selling a vision of navigation, and we felt like this was the opening opportunity.

But more, we saw navigation as the pinnacle. Because somehow, someone deemed vision as the most important sense, and then... You know, everything else was less than that. And so when you look at the research dollars spent over the last 100 years on the five senses, you'll see dramatically that most of it is in vision.

That's why my Oculus Quest cost $249, but a Braille keyboard costs... Correct me if I'm wrong... $2500? Because we care more to make VR Headsets cheaper and put research dollars behind it.

That's what I mean by care. We put research dollars behind it. Bose spent $50 million developing noise canceling in 15 years. The CEO came to him and said...

Dr. Bose... Rest in peace, Dr. Bose.

He said... We spent $50 million in 15 years, developing noise canceling. He said... Wow.

$50 million. If I was the CEO of a publicly traded company, I would have been fired years ago. Now we're in a space where... How do we take longer term visions around what it means to build products and to build ecosystems around them?

Now vision is the king. We're gonna walk in and usurp the king by showing that you can do navigation with only touch. And that was our original mission. Was: How do we get people out of their phones and back into the real world?

And we started by going to who, obviously? Travelers. Who needs to get out of their phone more than people who are traveling? Right?

I lived in Japan for six months. Addresses don't make sense. I had to... The cops couldn't help me figure out where I was at.

They would pull out a book and everything. But if I could just vibrate around and didn't have to trust in that piece of it, I could use my vision and hearing to pay attention to what's going on around me. If your vision and hearing isn't accessible to you, that's a pretty big challenge. So...

We took on this big opportunity. Navigation. One billion people use Google Maps every single month. And as we grew, we really looked at it and we saw the opportunity was really...

How do we take this information and communicate it through touch? And this is where my previous history of working with the kung fu suit... Essentially I was trying to find a way to leverage communicating information directly through the skin, without needing someone physically there to tell you -- or verbally tell you. So I remembered my kung fu practice, and I remembered that my teacher would move my joints into position with touch.

Not say a single word. So I was like... How do we leverage that technology in navigation? And ultimately, what we did is we built what we call the haptic corridor.

The haptic corridor is a 360 degree touch-based experience that when you're going in the right direction, you feel absolutely nothing. You spin slightly to the left, about 20 degrees, left or right of center, you get a tiny vibration. And the vibration scales the wronger you are. Until you're 180 degrees the wrong way.

We give you the loudest vibration we can. What this does is it plays a simple game of hot and cold through touch. That allows you to know exactly which way is the right way to go. And tells you...

With volume... How wrong you are. And we found that people who are blind and visually impaired really gravitated towards this technology. Now, I talked about the idea of starting with travelers.

There was one problem. I had to spend 30 minutes telling a sighted person why a visual map is a problem. 30 minutes. I would have 2 minutes left to talk about how haptics is gonna change the world.

Wasn't a lot of time. Wasn't a great pitch. Right? And then ultimately, at the end, we knew this was great for the blind community.

But we felt like... This will get there at the end, after we make sure it works for everyone else first. Because we had no idea we could even navigate people using haptics. So let's start there.

Right? At the end of the day, what happened is that we realized... And this was... You know, South By Southwest is coming up.

I'm heading there Friday. They've become investors of ours. I'm going to do a performance. I'm gonna do a haptic rap to educate people about touch.

Maybe I'll let you hear a verse of it. Our first trip, my team went down there and pulled random people out of the crowd to get them to try our band on. They would spin around. And then we would get a lot of people to stop in the right direction.

We were using this to get data. You know, this is how you got data when you don't have any money. It was great. One of the people we pulled into the audience happened to be...

He was like... Wow. This is amazing. I work for the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

You should take this to the blind school right now. Right now, right now? We're about to leave tomorrow. Me and my co-founder literally pack up, at that moment, jump in the taxi, and go to the Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired.

Long story short... Nobody was expecting us. We saw people in the parking lot. We said...

Let's ask them. We have technology that we think will help people who are blind. But we're not sure. They said...

Well, go here and do this. Someone was like... How does it work? He tried it on.

I have a joke that says... When we make people spin around, they become our friends. He spun around... You need to speak to Scott, the assistant commissioner on the second floor.

We walked into his office unannounced, with a crew of four employees guiding us, plus a crew of our own, three. I imagined it looked like the Mafia was showing up for you, or a hitman. I was like... Hey, Scott.

We're friendly. And we have this technology. We would love to spend some time with you. You know, truth be told, he gave us four hours of his day.

Let us use his office. We borrowed some of his employees who were blind off of their work schedules so they could talk to us and try the device out. And by the end of that conversation, all three of my co-founders -- we never agree -- but all three of my co-founders walked out unanimous, for independent reasons, that... The only way to do what we were doing is to start with the blind and visually impaired market first.

And that transformed our entire company. This was 2016. The minute that happens, we start going in, investors start understanding what it is that we're doing now, and more importantly, sighted people started to see the opportunity for themselves. Now I give a presentation and always someone sighted comes over to me and says...

Hi! I'm not blind. But... I have a hard time figuring out which way I'm facing when I get off the train.

Can I use your technology? And we're like... Yes! And that was the point.

You know? When we initially started, we went to the National Federation of the Blind and they told us: Don't build a blind device. Build a device everybody can use, but optimize for the blind experience. If you build it for us, we won't want it.

If you build it and it works great for us and everyone else, we'll find you. Don't worry. And that was the message that we took from the whole experience. And so...

Now where are we? The WayBand app is available in the App Store. We have a navigation app. We fall into two bubbles.

We have a wearable and the navigation app. Our navigation app is available. And initially, we started with this idea of only using it for the WayBand. Ultimately, what we realized was...

With the economic disparities, unemployment statistics that we just heard about, that was a big challenge, to make people buy another device. So the first thing we did was... Can we make the phone vibrate so they don't need to buy anything additional? And then we added the Apple Watch integration and other smart devices.

Can we tag into what it is you're already wearing? Our patent covers the haptic corridor. It doesn't cover just the WayBand. You can put it on your watch, your phone, the seat of your car.

We're still covered. This opened up a whole opportunity for us. But more importantly, it opened up a different business model. So after we delivered the hardware products to market, we realized we had an even bigger opportunity.

Companies like Uber and Disney and Waymo and mapping companies were like... Hey, I don't want to use your app or your band, but if I could take your haptic corridor and put it in my thing, that would be amazing, because I would have accessible navigation very easily. We started to look like... Wow.

We could integrate our haptic corridor into Google Maps. A billion people have accessible navigation instantly. Changes the entire dynamics of what we can do, versus the WayBand. We still make the WayBand.

You can still go to Amazon right now and buy it. It's available. But one of the other things we did -- because of this new business model, I listen to audiobooks exclusively. How much of that money goes back to the blind community?

That's who it was created for. I use Siri exclusively. I use voice assistants for everything. I don't touch my phone unless I have to.

How much of that money -- the technology being available is great. More audio books means more people have accessibility. But from an equity point of view... Can we do something a little bit different?

This is where we're like... What if we got enterprise customers to make the app available for free? So the WayBand app was $99. The WayBand cost $249.

As of last month, the app is now available for free with an optional 99 cents a year just to support the development. And now every person who is blind all around the world can download WayBand for free. And we were able to do this, because, again, we were thinking about business models that leveraged technology that was built for the blind community, into software enterprise solutions. And having that pay for the technology, so the community can have access to it.

And we see this as like... Not only just a great opportunity for us. But a new way of doing things. Right?

You know? Because at that point, we talk about this idea of feedback. And being important -- I'm not blind. We built the company for people who are blind and visually impaired.

How did we do it? Because we listened. We put out crap, they told us it was crap, and we fixed it. That's it!

It's a very simple process. Just listen. Right? And because we listened, we got access to so many people who were just really willing to...

We had people testing in Alaska. There are WayBands in Saudi Arabia right now. It's crazy. It blows my mind.

But we've been on this journey for 7 long years. It took a long time for people to get to a point where we are now. Where obviously we need technology that is accessible. Right?

This was a niche market when I was talking to investors six years ago. Right? And so I just want to say that... All in all...

Our journey has been pretty amazing. Really want to thank a lot of our supporters. Sandy, thank you for giving us the opportunity to be here. And as a side note, as my ending, I'm gonna share the first verse of my haptic rap with you.

Right? So... Thank you, thank you. So side story...

I've been rapping kind of... Since I was 16 years old. Not really. I wanted to be a rapper.

Realized I wouldn't be any good, because Jay-Z was too great. So I decided to do something else with my life. A lot of people run marathons. We did that.

I forgot to say. We let the first person who was blind run a marathon without sighted assistance. Oh, thank you, thank you. So I made a good choice.

How do I jump back into my personal expression? We have a marketing problem with haptics. Because no one knows what the word means. I made a rap to tell you.

Right now. Let's see how this goes. All right. We have a vision.

We have a vision. We have a vision. We have a vision. We have a vision of a world that doesn't need vision.

We have a vision of a world that doesn't need vision. Okay. Wait. Sorry.

I messed that up. I'm gonna start that again! This is good practice for me. I have to get on stage.

In my car, it sounds totally different when I do it. I'm way better! All right. Okay.

Um... We... Have a vision of a world that doesn't need vision. Elevating touch to the level of sight and sound and that's our mission.

Research spending today's access tomorrow for all of our children. Look at the spending. Over the last hundred years, spread over each of the five of our senses. Seeing is believing.

Most want the vision. Second went the sound, which is pretty far distant for 100 years money only spent on two senses. Isn't that senseless? That shit is senseless.

Here's my two cents, and vision is king and touch is imprisoned. Patriarchy of all the senses is sight? Who really made that decision? Who the eff made that decision?

No one with limited vision. None of the 285 million. And wasn't listening to the 460 folks with limited hearing. Digital soul sight and sound driven that it left like a billion on the wrong side of a digital divide with virtually no pot to piss in.

The future is touch. That's our mission. Touch with the weight and intention of dramatically making a difference. You need to listen.

Thank you! And now I'm going to introduce Mr. Ron Russo!

That is gonna be difficult to follow. I will not be ending with a rap. Of any sort. First...

I would like to thank the sponsors, Sandy, Perkins, as well, for having me tonight. To tell you a little bit about the story of ARx and the company and how we got involved in it, and maybe a little bit about how we see the opportunity to address problems that have existed forever. For folks with visual impairments or blindness. We're investors.

5Lion Ventures, early stage investor, we invested in a company founded by two Italian entrepreneurs, technologists in their own right. When we met them, they were working out of a small Studio in Switzerland. They intentionally built their work to include two employees with visual impairment. I think their vision for what Horace, which is what the original company was, is to have real dialogue in a community and understand what the true needs of that community were.

As opposed to... What we've seen, I think, for decades from technology solutions, which are developed by technologists who really don't have a good understanding of what the true needs are. And I think there's a couple layers to that. I think that for me, there's the foundational needs of assistive technology, using that term broadly.

And I think that there are the block and tackle needs of form and function, the technology that addresses specific elements of that need, which... Sandy laid out. Some of them are navigation, object detection, text reading, facial recognition. And so on.

But even today, in 2023, much of the technology that exists still feels very clinical. It feels very sterile. It feels antiseptic. And it's not been built as consumer products are built.

It hasn't been built with magnetism or sexiness or fun. And the iterations that ARx has gone through... The first investment in ARx was made in 2016. So we're working on a similar timeline to Keith.

And we've iterated quite a bit over those seven years. And I think there's been some great victories and some terrible defeats. But I think the best part for us has been the learnings that we've gathered from the dialogue. True dialogue.

And by listening first. You know, I think one of the most frustrating elements for me of understanding what exists currently, and even the strategic vision of some of the largest incumbent technology companies is that... They still to this day don't engage with the community. They don't listen to the true needs of the community.

And as a result, some of the companies, without getting into them specifically, which have raised the most capital on those slides... Have virtually no product market fit with the community that they originally intended to provide product to. And to me, that's in certain ways an indictment of the philosophy. It's an indictment of the vision of founders.

And I think we and the founders of Horace and then Charles Leclercq, the current CEO of ARx, have come at it quite differently. We met Charles actually through one of our colleagues, who showed up here unannounced. Who was the CEO and founder of one of our other portfolio companies. It was a nice surprise for me.

But Jan helped us find Charles. And Charles didn't have experience in assistive technology. He worked in gaming and in computer vision and in augmented audio -- audio AR. And as a result, his views on what ARx should be, I think, dovetailed nicely with our views.

That the foundational needs are still the same. And you must have text reading or object recognition or navigation -- whatever you purport to make available to this community -- must be there. And it must work flawlessly. That is difficult.

But beyond that, these offerings should be fun. They should be exciting. And he's integrated, I think, some of those elements into what ARx is. And he has some scene recognition.

Which is beautiful. Is it foundationally necessary for object recognition or facial recognition or text? No. But it can give you the audio experience of looking at a sunrise.

Or of a rainstorm. Or of a cityscape with buildings. And I credit Charles with understanding some of the othered elements of what we believed ARx would be. And when I think about the opportunity to effect change amongst hundreds of millions of people with visual impairment, I'm as excited as I've ever been about ARx.

And I think the opportunity in certain ways is more urgent. And technology continues to evolve in a positive way. And there are other wearables and pieces of hardware and software and AI and machine learning, computer vision, and cameras, et cetera, continue to evolve. And I think progress beautifully.

And there's no reason to recreate the wheel. You know? Sandy and Keith both said it. Things that work -- we should adopt.

We're never going to be able to compete with Google or Microsoft or incumbent technology companies that are building some of the underlying technology that we may leverage. But the reality is that without the effort and without the dialogue, it will be very difficult to make products that truly can change the lives of people who use that product. So just getting back to the origin story a little bit... When we first got attached to ARx, which was Horace at the time, we really believed in the founders.

We believed in their mission. And in their vision. And the development. And it's been an interesting ride.

I think, like Keith, we had some thoughts about scaling. And it's a hardware device, at the end of the day. Although there's elements of software that we use. Which we believe could provide a platform experience to larger entities that might want to integrate it.

But ultimately, we fall back on the user experience. And the user experience for ARx is something that is pretty amazing. And I feel... You know, some pride -- not in the authorship, but the pride in the effort that's been expended over the course of six years.

To push through and to try to understand those needs. You know, one of our investors in another business gave me an analog, which I love. Which is, I think, very relevant to this. It was relating to health care more specifically.

But the concept that he introduced was that health care organizations today create a menu. They deliver a menu to a patient. And say: Here, John Smith. Take a look at this menu.

And you pick one of the ten things that are on that menu. The reality is that those ten choices may not be at all relevant to John Smith. Because they don't have a dialogue. There is no iterative nature of that relationship.

There is no listening that happens. And for us, the same holds true. You know, I think we are better for the failures that we've had. We are better for the understandings that we've gained over the last six plus years and the iterations that have been a product of failure.

And there's been tons of them, over that time. It's been really, really interesting for me and Sandy -- I give you and Perkins a tremendous amount of credit. It's pretty incredible what exists, you know, over the last 200 years, and looking forward, I think the future is quite bright. And one of the terms which -- these are Sandy's words, not mine.

Progress over perfection is everything. And I think we've tried to live those words at ARx. And we know that ARx is not perfect. There are certainly problems with it.

And... You know, it is a wearable device that sits on the side of your head. It's a stereoscopic camera with bone conducting audio. And that was intentionally created by the founders, because if you have a visual impairment, the last thing in the world you want to do is lose one of your other senses.

So bone conducting audio gives you the sound that you need, without broadcasting it to the rest of the world around you. And that in certain ways is very -- keep it simple, stupid -- and very obvious. But in other ways, it reflects the mechanisms that we've tried to employ and tried to understand and to listen, truly listen. But as I look at some of those charts, it's incredible.

It really is incredible. And a lot of that progress has happened over the course of the last five or six years. And that's the good news. The good news is that there's never been more focus on trying to truly address the needs of folks with visual impairment.

And I think the good news is that there's never been more will amongst the leaders, the incumbent technology companies, to try to help support that. So we have worked quite closely with a number of those companies, in understanding what technology they have, which maybe we could layer in. Maybe we can add... We can partner.

And even some of the earlier stage companies -- I would consider us earlier stage as well -- but even the earlier stage companies, I think, have a much more open mind about collaboration. And co-support. Or co-development of product. And I guess for me, it comes back to that.

You know, you have to have that commitment. You have to believe, and you have to be able to forge forward. And I think... I've seen what ARx can provide.

I've seen the feedback from users, and the feedback has been really, truly excellent. And I give Charles the credit for that. But it's really, really fun to see someone who uses ARx for the first time, and has a great experience. And you know, you understand that if there's 300, 400, 500 million people in the world whose lives you could affect, either through independence or autonomy or excitement or magnetism or fun, there's no reason why that shouldn't happen.

And I'm incredibly excited about what the future looks like for us. For some of the other companies that we're following. Fast following or collaborating with. And so I would extend the same offer, I think, that Sandy extended.

I would love to hear from all of you. We do try to reach out to our community. And we do want to understand what things you may want or need. I think we also try to create bona fide feedback loops.

And one of the examples I gave was: We've been working on a way to, in effect, create a blockchain. Not a blockchain in the sense of currency, but create a transparent feedback loop for our community. So that transparent feedback loop would enable me as a user to say: On March 7th, at 8:30, text reading didn't work well. I was trying to read a menu or a book, or a letter.

That feedback then lives in the public domain. And we then, as an organization, must respond to that query. And maybe we respond to it tonight. Maybe we respond to it tomorrow.

Maybe we understand that there's an issue. We may not be able to solve that issue immediately. But being responsive is a start. You know?

Some of these technologies that exist currently -- and again, I'll go back to the largest technology companies that exist -- don't have a feedback loop. And they're not held accountable for the shortcomings or the gaps that exist in the products that they brought to market. And there's no way for a user to understand whether or not those companies know there was a problem, are working on a solution, or even care to do either of those two things.

So I think for us, we're trying to establish that dialogue transparently and openly. And presently. And in a way that I think builds a rapport and builds a bona fide level of trust in the community. That we're out here trying to solve some real problems.

And also trying to have some fun along the way. So I don't know how we are on time. I didn't put up a timer on this. But...

I thank all of you for being here today. And I thank you, Sandy, for the introduction and for the opportunity to speak. I look forward to speaking with some of you afterwards, or in the future. But thanks again.

And that's all I have.

Yeah. Great job. All right! Thank you so much, everyone.

That concludes the speaking part of our program. No? We have... Yes.

Okay. Great. We're gonna get a closeout here. Here we go.

We have a mic here for Q and A as well.

Okay.

All right. Before I give it to the audience and webcast questions, does anyone in the audience here have a question they would like to ask? All right.

Hi. I just have a question regarding the mapping. Do you think you'll add potential investors to a potential map, so people can quickly access accelerators and investors that may be more amenable to a longer time frame it takes the disability tech product out into the world?

Yes. Great question. So it's on our near term road map to create an Open Sourced Airtable, basically, of angel investors interested in disability tech, or assistive technology. And venture funds as well.

So this is also a call. Feel free to send them our way, if you know them. We have a bunch. But if you're one who is listening too, please do reach out.

We want to make this list available. We'll also probably put together a map of all the incubators and accelerators that focus on disability technology. So there's a variety of things that we can do there.

I'm curious about the active development of your database that you're working on. How you're going about maintaining the accuracy of it currently and discovering new players in the market, as the industry evolves?

Yeah. Great question. We've got a lot of alerts set. So...

Every day, we have inbound. The more people we tell what we're doing, the more companies people send us. Right? We also have an advisory group.

Keith is one of our advisory group members. And Charles from ARx is one of our advisory group members as well. They're consistently scouring to see kind of what's going on out there. But really the answer is: I looked at all the disability tech accelerators and incubator programs, I read every market research report I could.

I scoured CB Insights, Crunchbase, DealBook, to call the core companies. And then we just add as we go. But Dylan is our full-time data analyst co-op. So we actually have a full-time resource dedicated to the research side of things.

Okay. Question from the webcast. What did the speakers think about the sonification of charts? How useful it could be for the visually impaired, comparing with the conventional text alternatives.

It's a great question. Actually, within our partnership with Olin College of Engineering, we've been working with Perkins Access, which is our digital accessibility consulting group as well. To test the sonification of charts and data. So we did a variety of user testing sessions, with folks with different visual impairments.

So low vision, blind, blind later in life, you know, so a variety of different tests. To see how folks with visual impairments like to absorb charts and graphs. And we did some sonification testing in there as well. Over the next month or two, we're gonna be putting those computer visualizations with some sonification up on our site.

So they're not ready yet. But soon-ish. They'll be up there.

Cool.

How do you consider companies that do not focus on disability tech, but may have a department that focuses on disability tech? Were there any edge cases that you had to have a debate about whether to include or not include?

Yes. So actually... There's a variety of companies that are not in our database, that are actually doing a lot with regards to disability tech. Meaning...

Microsoft. I didn't put a big company in here. I really tried to do a start-up market analysis. So there are...

That's a whole other research realm. Right? What are big tech companies doing with regards to disability and accessibility? Which is on our research road map.

There were some companies where... I would find something, and it actually was just like a research project at a university that stopped. And so I had to make the decision... Do I put that in?

Did these students actually try to form a company and get something going? And there are probably around 30 to 50 of those. Where I found newspaper articles on them. But I chose not to include those projects, because they didn't actually advance to the stage of people pursuing them as a company.

Thank you very much. Another one from the webcast. Sandy, what is the Howe Center's business model? Combination of VC and private equity, public funding, or grants?

Great question. We are putting together our business model right now. And if you would like to invest in the Howe Innovation Center, please find me or Natalie or Ali afterwards!

Awesome. Another one from the webcast. And please raise your hand in the audience if you have questions. For Keith: Are there any haptic standards?

For example, two buzzes for turn left?

So... From the point of view of haptic standards for the world, not really. Right? The haptics industry is kind of coming together to work these things out.

And that's a big part of what we see. I've been talking to a lot of CEOs of other haptics companies. I can say that there are other CEOs of other haptics companies now. Which is amazing.

But a lot of what's going on is... How do we make sure that we get device interoperability for haptics and feeling from one device to another. But for our device, if we're talking about standards for navigating, we've built them like a system of buzzes that allow you... So we don't do the buzz buzz thing.

Because remembering too many signals becomes a challenge. And I think the limit is about five to eight signals that you can remember, before you actually have to start studying. And we don't want to make -- language acquisition is really hard. We don't want to go that product route.

Right? So what we've done is we've made the haptic corridor so intuitive that everyone can figure out the right way to go. And what we've done is... Through the user piece, we realized that people would get to the corner and they would stop.

Okay. Where do I go next? So we started giving preemptive left and right haptics signals on the way there. So you know...

Left is coming up. You can kind of keep it moving. And in those, we've standardized what left haptics are and what right haptics are. But our real goal is that -- who made us the haptic gods to determine what right and left haptics should be.

Right? Our real goal is: How do we build tools to allow you to build your own version of whatever the standards are, and then do machine learning at scale to see what left should be. Based off of community input, as opposed to kind of topdown dictatorship.

Thank you very much.

Hi. I'm Jan. Founder of an Augmented Reality Company called Beam. Good friend of Ron's as well.

This is less of a question, more of a statement. You know, the ability for everyone to come together and create an ecosystem like this, I think, has a huge impact on the commercialization of the tech. We work with a lot of the largest tech companies in the US. And they often say accessibility technology in its commercialization phase is a hit and miss.

For them to focus on. And they would rather focus on it as a project to assist their PR or to be able to talk about, at their HEMs. So for everyone to be able to come together here and create all this data, I think, is gonna have a profound impact on the seriousness that these big tech companies will take on the industry. So really well done for that.

Awesome. Thank you. That's part of the goal. Great.

Hi. Pardon my throat. I'm Kevin Blemel. I work for 2U, and I'm senior director of product accessibility there.

And I'm familiar with Teach Access as an organization that wants to bring into tech education standards and understanding into the curriculum, so that people who start building products are aware at the outset of their careers how to approach it without having to come and kind of learn it on the job at some place that happens to care about it. I'm wondering if you're familiar with any organizations or entities that are trying to push that same kind of education early into the system around the design, UX field, or into business or product strategy or thinking.

It's a great question. I actually am not. I can say, though, that every week at Perkins, I get four to five emails from student groups. Who are working on a product in the assistive tech space.

And they're looking for access to people. To either talk about for primary market research or for user testing. And so that leads me to make an assumption that universities are embedding this type of user research and testing into their entrepreneurship programs. Or their industrial design programs.

Right now, we sometimes have the capability to meet those needs. But that's something that we want to stand up over the coming year or two. But I don't know of any. Jennifer, do you?

We can also do some research and get back to you. I'm good at research, apparently. (laughter)

Hey, Sandy. So looking at those charts, when you see all of those companies distributed, where are you -- oh my gosh. How is there not a company for X? Where are the big gaps and opportunities in your mind?

Yeah. It's a very, very good question. And I'm not sure I can do it justice with an answer right now. I would say that...

I looked at it like a month ago. And I said... Inclusive employment? Four companies?

That can't be right. And I went back in and actually realized that my data entry needed to be like... More robust there. And all of a sudden I found...

I think it was 21 companies or something within this space. And that's because in my research, it was really interesting. In the coding for the language, for those companies, disability didn't necessarily pop up. In inclusive employment.

So bias, women engineering, race, that would be in the language describing the company. But not necessarily disability. And that's how I would miss it from the data pull. So a lot of this is still a work in progress.

I would say that that was one that I noticed. Also, you know, education and completing college -- there's a lot of information access technologies. I was introduced to a company recently that's trying to improve how Braille is printed. So this is just a statistic that kind of floors me.

If you need an advanced calculus Braille textbook, it can take a year and a half to print and costs $35,000. So... Huge problem! In that space.

Right? And so I think that that's one... Braille literacy rates, globally, are quite low. They're around 10%.

So 9 out of every 10 people who are blind or visually impaired actually don't read Braille. Part of that has to do with Braille education and how tough it is. So there are some interesting start-ups within that space. There's a company called Thinkerbell Labs that's trying to gamify teaching Braille through a device they're selling through APH called Polly.

And there's a start-up coming out of Cornell that's like a glove that uses an AI algorithm to read the Braille cell. So that you get the feedback in realtime as to what you're feeling with your finger. But these are just some spaces where I haven't seen as much attention. Like Braille literacy.

And it's a big problem. That could be tackled. Because it's the only way that people who are visually impaired can write. It's the path to literacy.

Yeah. Sure.

Could you take the mic? Thank you.

Forgive me if this is an oversimple question. But... With the hundreds -- at minimum, hundreds of visually impaired people living in our community, where do they go to find all of these products?

It's a very good question. So... In the education system, a lot of them come from an organization called American Printing House for the Blind. They provide a lot of the education assistive technology in the United States.

There are also a lot of regional distributors of assistive technology. So you go to your local low vision and blindness distributor. And what they have in stock is what you're exposed to. And so that's...

And I actually did show the market map to a regional distributor. And he recognized 5% of the companies on the market map. Which shows that 95% of the technologies that are out there aren't necessarily on his radar, or they don't make sense for them to carry in their store, because of... They're an app.

Or the mark-ups don't make sense. So... I just thought that that was really interesting. Because it means that if you...

Let's say you have some cardiac event and you lose part of your vision and you go to your local regional distributor to find out what assistive technology you can access... What they have is what you're exposed to. And so we're hoping that our market map and the research insights that we can put out through the Howe Innovation Center will evolve into a place where people can find a variety of technologies and services that might meet their needs or their loved ones' needs or their child's needs, by searching through what you're actually looking for.

Thank you.

We're gonna do one last question. Do we have anyone? Do we have anyone here in the audience who would like to ask a last question? Or do we have anything on the...

All right. Now I get to choose the last question.

Oh, fun.

Hm. Okay. This is a good one. If anyone was at our last meetup, what do you all think is the best use of artificial intelligence or AI for accessibility?

That's a very specific one. I'm going to pass it to Keith first. And I'm gonna buy myself time to think.

Artificial intelligence for accessibility? There's so many ways you can go. I think that speaking specifically from haptics, I spent two years studying color theory as a designer. I know how the brain processes color information.

How eyes process color information. Challenges of eyes processing color information. How to get around that. Also, I can do what?

Get you to look where I want you to look. Right? But, like, we don't have that kind of research with touch. We don't have the scale.

And why? Because you know touch was related to sex for most of human history. And we were like... Don't do that.

So guess what? If you say do something wearable technology, the first thing you do is put lights in your hoodie. If you research touch... That wasn't gonna happen.

So we have a deficiency in understanding how the brain processes touch information. More importantly, in our case, the average haptician -- you can't get a haptics degree at the undergrad or masters level. The closest is human-computer interface, and that's at the PhD level. I may be wrong.

So correct me, community, if I'm offtarget, but at the PhD level essentially is the only time you get hapticians. So they have the same knowledge base as a general practitioner. That makes haptics really expensive to make! You know?

I need an undergraduate haptics course. I need a General Assembly of haptics. Where I can put someone in, and in nine or twelve months, they understand the fundamentals and can start working. So I think where AI really supports the haptics space is...

How do we do all this research at scale? I don't know if the things that vibrate and I like... Or things that touch tactilely I like -- you like or you like or you like. This is gonna be as personal as we get.

This world is... This is the only time... Haptics are the only way a digital product can touch you. And that's why it's so tightly controlled.

Apple did a really great job putting controls on it, so apps aren't just buzz buzz buzz buzz buzz, look at me, look at me. But now what we really need to do is really open up these channels so that we can get more research in. I think AI and machine learning on that research is gonna quantum leap our ability to kind of process all the information we're gonna get at scale to do actionable insights.

I thought of an answer, while listening at the same time. So I actually thought of two. One is taking computer vision technologies and actually moving from interpreting what is there through, like, an optical character recognition, to actually a scene reader. So you're walking down the street and it's telling you -- there's a blue house on your left and a car in the driveway, rather than it just saying...

51... Maple Street. Actually kind of taking it to the next level of what you're absorbing and where you are. I think that would be really impactful.

Another is around augmentative and alternative communication tools. So everybody is afraid of ChatGPT, and these large language processors, but they actually have a big implication for the AAC systems. And I'm not quite sure how it would work. But I can just really see these large language models taking AAC communication to a new level.

So those are my two answers. Ron? Do you have one?

I think relating to ARx specifically, for me, it probably is related to computer vision. And closing the gaps in what is seen reactively, and then over time, with that information, the data... AI will enable you to know, for example, if you're walking down VC Street or Day street... That there's something on the left.

It will close the gaps in reactivity, as opposed to being a consumer of data that you see. There will be a baseline of information that is consumed, and there will be gaps that get closed. So that's not just speed. But it's accuracy.

And I think there's also scarily... Intuition that goes along with that. Understanding -- some of this already exists through Google. Right?

It knows you go to Starbucks at a particular time of day and gives you directions there. So I think closing the gaps in reactivity to me would be valuable. But again, I think some of the applications for AI will be specific to that use case. For me, I go immediately to computer vision.

Some of the stuff that maybe you talked about as well, Sandy. I'll let you close us out.

Okay. Well, is that it? We're gonna... Okay.

All right. Come on up here. Let's give the thank yous. And thank you, everyone, so much for having us.