A little over a year ago, I posted a story about Clear Ballot and Perkins Access coming together to make the literal voting process more accessible to disabled people. Perkins Access is part of the Massachusetts-homed Perkins School for the Blind, founded in 1829. Perkins Access joins with outside organizations to “provide more accessible and engaging digital experiences for people with disabilities.”
Another aspect of the Perkins School for the Blind is its Howe Innovation Center. The Center describes its work on its website as being built to “unlock the power of the entrepreneurial and disability communities to create purpose-built solutions for a more accessible world.” The Center further says it has three main roles: amplifying the lived experience of disabled people; catalyze technological innovation; and connect and convene disabled people with their allies and partners.
The Howe Innovation Center launched to the public in May.
In an interview with me conducted via videoconference in early June, Howe Innovation Center executive director Sandy Lacey explained she joined Perkins a year ago to in order to help the institution “stand up this initiative to connect the community of people with disabilities with the innovation community.” Lacey was candid in telling me she’s a relative newcomer to the disability space, having previously worked with startups and in former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick’s administration, but felt excited at the opportunity when she learned of the job opening. She saw a chance to use her background and skillset to help despite being a newbie. “I might not know a lot about disability and accessibility, but I know a lot about ecosystem development and what that recipe is like,” Lacey said. “I thought, ‘let’s take this recipe that I’ve seen be successful other places and let’s try to let’s create that Innovation Center this community and this market deserves.’”
A big project spearheaded by Lacey was the building of a database containing a list of companies who work on technologies and other products intended for the disability community. Lacey explained Perkins chief executive Dave Power would receive hoards of messages from companies about their products for the disability community. As a way of organizing the information, Lacey sorted the companies by the community they were trying to serve. Then came sorting the companies by the technologies they used, such as LiDAR and more. “Now the database is basically filled out for those 750 companies, Lacey said. “That’s a slice of the market; I definitely do not think it’s the entire market, but we can start running some analysis. We can see how much money disability technology companies raised in 2022 and compare that against a decade earlier in 2012, for example.”
After building it, Lacey and team decided on publishing insights gleaned from their newfound database. She explained the team had created what she described as a “perceptual market map” of companies who are innovating for the Blind and visually impaired communities; the information was clustered by navigation and so forth. Lacey cited a company who developed an accessible home pregnancy test. Moreover, Lacey said Perkins worked with the Olin College of Engineering in order to create a visualization of the data. Building on their original work, Lacey said Perkins will be building a similarly-styled investor database, as well as releasing a white paper on what she termed “defining the disability tech market.” Lacey will be in San Francisco next month for TechCrunch Disrupt to discuss Perkins and the Howe Innovation Center.
“We’ve gone very heavy on data. We are looking at building a community of people with disabilities to meet that demand from the private sector for primary market research, user testing, and customer insights. We want to amplify the lived experience of people with disabilities,” Lacey told me of building the databases.
Asked about what lessons she’s learned from building these databases, Lacey said assistive technologies have “explosive” potential for the disability community, whether it be in generative AI, robotics, and more. It’s been an eye-opening experience for Lacey; after working in tech for the last two decades, it’s only been in the last few years that she’s been exposed to accessibility. She talks to a lot of founders about their work, and it’s always revelatory for her to see just how expansive the market truly is for assistive technologies. A goal is to have accessibility permeate more of the broader tech market, beyond the biggest companies.
Abled people working on accessibility, Lacey told me, have been “incredibly receptive” towards the work Perkins is doing. Overall, however, she believes Perkins has more of an obligation rather than an opportunity to steward change and amplify awareness of accessibility. The Perkins brand, she said, has always been about opening doors.
“It’s past due time that that accessibility gets centered in broader tech,” Lacey said of the need for assistive technology to move more into the mainstream consciousness. “I’ve seen some amazing, amazing projects from big tech companies. Don’t get me wrong, some of the stuff that Google and Amazon have done to increase accessibility is so incredibly impressive. But I think that a lot of the tech ecosystem has had accessibility, or just incorporating a customer with a disability into their product design and development, as an afterthought. My hope is the Howe Innovation Center can help people think differently.”
At the end of the day, Lacey’s work is about engendering inclusion.
“I hope people [in tech] start doing the right thing from the beginning,” she said of the importance of acknowledging disabled people. “I think it’s important we start bringing the conversation beyond just the amazing community that has worked in assistive technology and disability tech for the last two decades towards the broader tech ecosystem.”
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