Defining Disability Tech: Innovations for the World's Largest Minority

8:28PM Sep 20, 2023

Speakers:

Keywords:

disability

companies

perkins

accessibility

tech

access

community

built

braille

product

entrepreneurs

accessible

innovation

years

impaired

techcrunch

people

visual impairments

database

folks

All right, everyone. Hear me, workin? All right good. Um, the session you are in right now is called defining disability tech innovations for the world's largest minority. My name is Sandy Lacey and I'm the Executive Director of the how innovation center at the Perkins School for the Blind. I'm a white woman in my midlife early 40s. I have brown hair, brown eyes, I'm wearing green glasses, a navy blue blazer and jeans. So what is the how innovation center and why is Perkins School for the Blind at a tech conference? Well, these are great questions, and I will be sure to answer them as we go through this talk. But first, I just want to give you a little bit about my background so you can get to know me and then I kind of want to get to know who's in a breakout session with us today. I'm a three time or early startup operator. So I come from the entrepreneurship background, usually first woman hire first business hire brought on to complement a technical founder. So I'm intimately familiar with those early challenges of getting a startup off the ground. I'm also a corporate innovation lab builder. I spent six years running the innovation labs at John Hancock Manulife so I ran our advanced technology practice there, including our blockchain and connected device practice. And one of the highlights of my career. I'm an educator so I've spent six years teaching entrepreneurship to undergraduates at Tufts University. And the last two years I've been teaching the advanced entrepreneurship class at MIT Sloan School of Management, very, very fulfilling roles. But most relevant to why I am now working at Perkins School for the Blind, is because I spent a significant amount of my career working for the former governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick, on supporting an innovation ecosystem. around climate tech technology is so dating myself a little bit but around 1214 years ago, we knew there were 4000 clean energy companies in Massachusetts, but there wasn't really an organized ecosystem to support them and accelerate their innovation. I'm taking this experience, and we're now applying it to the disability space. Like many of you, though, I'm pretty new to disability and accessibility. I've been at Perkins for about a year and a half. So I want to make this session as open and welcoming as possible if you're new to the disability or accessibility world. There's a lot of exciting things happening and you will learn. You will leave here with three key takeaways on some of the cool stuff that's happening. At the intersection of disability and tech. So I want to get an idea of who's in the room with me today. So I'm going to ask for people to become a little bit engaged, not just raise your hands but also hoot and holler if you're an entrepreneur or like a founder of a startup can you raise your hand who'd holler let me know that you're here? All right, I see about 20 hands have gone up. Investors. Are there any investors in the room? 123455. Okay, we'll see five hands. Well, we're going to change that. I'm going to show you the numbers as to why that's going to change in this presentation. Do you work in tech? Are you a product manager or software engineer or designer? All right, okay. Got Around 2025 people. Okay, well, thank you so much. You know, it's really great to see diversity in the pool of folks who are here to learn about disability and technology.

So this is what the blind here.

Pause really quickly. Okay, so, moving on, you know, I just want to say we're really happy to be here at TechCrunch just to be a part of the conversation of the intersection of disability and technology. You know, getting into the room. As a person with a disability. It isn't always easy, and our community faces a significant number of barriers, even in the tech world. And so I want to introduce you to my friend and adviser William budding. He's actually in the room with me right now. William, do you mind raising your hand? Williams, a board member of the Perkins School for the Blind. He also works in tech. He's in talent acquisition at an E commerce software company. And William has the lived experience of being blind. So he has been a really great adviser to me, as I've learned more about the lived experience of blindness. And, you know, I told William that I thought we should speak at TechCrunch. And he said, great idea. Let's do it. And so the to be here at a breakout session. No, you have to be up voted, right. And so I want to just kind of show everybody what Williams journey was like, trying to support this exact breakout session. So for those of you who don't know some folks who are blind or low vision the way they access the internet, not all but some use screen reading software, which essentially just reads out loud, what's on the screen, but the software has to be compatible to the screen reading application. So this is Williams a way to support us getting here today.

So I'm going to just start putting wood down. nation's largest member TechCrunch read through 23 Choice dish tech, graphic graphics 736 Rs So this is just an unlabeled graphic of some time.

Might be the voting but I'm not sure.

Man, just I'm still getting down arrow to get to the next extra objects. List of two items with the T is

to the left of the session temperatures can stash that instruction is but I can't hit the arrow to the left as noted before.

And that went on for five minutes. We truncated the video down to 90 seconds for the purposes of this presentation. But it took William over five minutes of his life to realize he actually couldn't vote this session because the unlabeled graphic was the voting button. I want to be very clear that TechCrunch was incredibly proactive and helping solve this problem. So once it was identified, mediate workaround was created so that we could vote and then implementation went into process to make the entire voting process accessible. I wish other organizations were as proactive and responsive. But that is not always the case. And, you know, this really matters. Accessibility Matters for for a variety of reasons. But, you know, it's been 25 years since the internet went mainstream and 96% of the internet still remains and not accessible. And that's a huge problem. Just from a social equity perspective. We are excluding people from accessing information. When you can access information you can get news you can access financial banking, you can go shopping online if the website is built with accessibility in mind. When unfortunately only 4% of the internet is is built that way. And you know, the example I really like to give here is when back in March and April of 2020 when we were still calling it the Coronavirus when COVID had a lot of us were getting information about the prevalence of COVID via charts. And graphs in our neighborhood. None of those were built with accessibility in mind. And so folks who use screen readers had to immediately try to create workarounds to create to get access. And so from an social equity perspective, accessibility is incredibly important from a business perspective, though it also just makes more sense. People with disabilities and their allies control $13 trillion worth of annual disposable income. So if you're not building with accessibility, you know you're really leaving money on the table. Our community controls a significant portion of the spending economy. A great example here is if your website is not accessible, and somebody is trying to make restaurant reservations, reservations, you're not just losing their business, you're losing the business of their three friends who they were going to go out to dinner with as well. Same thing for physical accessibility right if the if the actual restaurant isn't accessible. It's not just the one person it's actually the four. So accessibility matters. And that's the first key takeaway that I want. I hope everybody can remember from this session is it unlocks access to information, it unlocks access to customers, it's the right thing to do and it makes better business sense. So why is Perkins School for the Blind now at a tech conference right on the screen right now is a photo of our campus in Watertown, Massachusetts. It's right outside of downtown and you know we have we're approaching our 200 year anniversary actually, we're going to turn 200 years old in 2029. You can't exist as an organization for 200 years if you aren't innovating along the way right. So innovation is really within our DNA. Our school is the center of what we do. We have 200 kids with multiple complex disabilities on campus. We also serve over 1000 Children in Massachusetts with visual impairments in the public schools because of inclusive education. So we have teachers of the visually impaired who go into the public schools and made sure materials are accessible for those kids. But just like we prepare our kids for the world, we are also preparing the world for our kids. We are an international NGO, we've touched over 100 countries around the world. We don't build schools, we build capacity. So we work with parents we work with teachers, and we work with policymakers so that every kid has the right and the access to an education. And like I said we've been innovating since day one on the slide right now are three images, one drawing and two photographs. I want to talk about the drawing first. So there's a white man in a like old and tiny blazer, this is from the 1830s and he's standing and pointing out a book and sitting next to him is a woman with a visual impairment and she's reading the Braille on the on the page and the gentleman is named Samuel Gridley, how that's H o w e and that's where the how innovation center is named after. And this guy he was a radical for his day and age in the 1830s How believes that people with disabilities should be incorporated into mainstream society. This was not common for his day and age. He was also just an entrepreneur in his own right. So he found the first students. He found the first teachers he raised the initial capital to get the school off the ground. And he was an innovator. He invented a precursor to Braille called Boston line type and that's the image on the bottom right. It's a raised tactile language. And, you know, as a feminist, I would be remiss if I didn't mention, his wife was the author of The Battle Hymn of the Republic. So just a really cool influential couple from the 1800s and Perkins in addition to inventing, you know, to pioneering education for the blind and visually impaired, we've also invented products. The last image on this page is of a little boy using what looks like a typewriter. But this is actually the Perkins Brailler was invented in 1953. And it's one of the main ways for folks who are blind to be able to gain literacy and create Braille and we still manufacture and distribute this product all over the world. And we've continued to innovate in the in the digital age. So on the left is an image of a mobile app called Blind ways which we built in via funding from google.org. And there's this phrase in the blindness community, the final frustrating feet, whether it's a final frustrating five feet, 15 feet or 40 feet, navigation, that's a it's a tough nut to crack. But I think everyone in this room can probably identify with standing and waiting for a bus and having the bus driver just go right on by. And if you're visually impaired, you rely on public transportation. And if you're not exactly at the right pole, the bus driver will pass you and so we built this product to solve that problem. The other image is of the CDI protocol, which I'll briefly talk about. It's a digital assessment tool that Perkins has created. CVI is the leading cause of childhood blindness in the United States today. It's highly correlated with premature birth, and it's a neurological condition. So the eyes, the brain can't necessarily interpret what the eyes can see and it's not necessarily very well understood by a large majority of the medical community. So Perkins is trying to make it easier for people to assess if a child does have CVI so that early intervention intervention can occur. And now we're trying to accelerate innovation outside of our own doors via the how innovation center. We've been working with entrepreneurs and innovators for almost two centuries now. And so we deeply understand that there are common barriers to innovation in the disability space. You know, entrepreneurs who are building products and services for people with disabilities, they face the same challenges most entrepreneurs face, how do I hire my team? How do I find initial seed capital, but there are two really unique barriers in the disability space that we have Perkins believe we can help solve via via the how innovation center but I want to talk about them quickly. The first is finding customers for primary market research and user testing. So every week at Perkins, we got inbound inquiries from student groups, entrepreneurs, fortune 100 company is saying, Hi, we've developed this product and we'd love to test it with 40 people with visual impairments. Can you can you help? It happens all the time? But here's here's the issue. disability organizations in general, we're not unique. This probably happens to tons of other disability organizations. They're not built to answer the requests of innovators, disability organizations are built to serve people with the community of people with disabilities that they have set out to help. So we believe we can help solve this problem by crowdsourcing by basically making it easier and centralizing the effort for disability tech entrepreneurs to access communities of people with disabilities for primary market research and user testing.

Okay, move on very quickly. You know, I just want to say also right here, just think about it for a second. If you're building a finance, like a FinTech app for millennials with student loans. It's gonna be pretty easy to find 500 people to respond to a survey and 50 people to try your product. If you're building a product for the deafblind community, it's a lot harder to find that community for for primary market research and user testing. So this is definitely a barrier to innovation. The second barrier to innovation is that you know, daily challenges of the community of people with disability is in them significantly are either misunderstood or unaddressed. And there are just these like thorny, persistent problems and work, school, education and daily life that the community is intimately and deeply understand. But for some reason, innovators just like aren't picking up on and i There are two images on the screen that I think really underscore this. So the first photo on the left is of an accessible pregnancy test. Today in the United States, if you are a woman who thinks you might be pregnant, and you are visually impaired, you cannot find out in private if you're pregnant. How did we let this happen? You must rely on somebody to interpret your at home results or a doctor. And that's a problem. Right? And it's not just pregnancy tests. Think about when when when we were in the throes of COVID. How many rapid tests did you all take? Right? You would probably take in tons during delta and Omicron when I when that was going on around everywhere. None of those tests were accessible for people who are blind or visually impaired. So it was literally, you know, fate, somebody would have to FaceTime a relative and make sure that they had put four drops into the thing instead of three drops in and then the relative you know, it was just a mass. And this doesn't seem like a very hard problem to solve. But it's because innovators aren't thinking about fully making products accessible. So that's one example. The second example I like to use is, there's about there's a photo on the screen of 10 two inch binders, their dark green, great book, it's Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in Braille. I don't know about all of you, but I already think the Harry Potter books are giant. Imagine carrying around 10 binder volumes so that you can read the book. And you know, there's a lot of thorny, persistent problems in Braille. Contrary to popular belief, only 10% of folks with visual impairments actually read Braille. And there are a lot of reasons as to why that is. Onset of blindness. You know, the age of onset of blindness is one of those but also just like Braille is really hard to learn. There's a shortage of teachers. People are starting to gamify it, but Braille is like the main way that folks who are blind and visually impaired can be literate. So how can we increase these numbers? Right. You know, just quickly on our data, we'll get into it a little bit later. We've identified 106 companies that are innovating in the space of navigation for people who are visually impaired, you know, and that's great because navigation is an enabling technology. If you can get to work safer if you can get to your place of employment with more confidence, you're going to open up access here, our statistics aren't great in in in these numbers either. At for every 10 kids with a visual impairment who start college, only four of them finish. Our unemployment rate in the United States for people who are visually impaired is 60%. And it's not because of lack of capability. It's because of lack of access to participation. So it's great to see all of this activity and navigation because it's enabling, but there's only one company that I know of that's working on making an accessible pregnancy test. So we think we can help actually crowdsource some of these common, you know, deeply understood problems in the disability space, and let's just embed them in every like social enterprise and AI for good class at MBA programs across the country. And see what actually happens. Here's a quote from an entrepreneur. They said, We don't want to develop a product that we think is good, we want to develop to develop what fits the community's needs. This is a disability tech founder. And that's exactly what we're doing. We are strengthening the ecosystem for disability technologies, by connecting the community of people with disabilities with the innovation community through a variety of different programming and partnerships. And we're doing this so that we can get better co designed products to market and I'm going to tell you a little bit more about how we're doing this in a moment. But I want to show you why it's important. Another reason why it's important. On the screen right now we have six different images of innovations that originated in the disability community that we all love and use and we probably don't didn't even realize that this is where they originated. So I want people to raise your hands or clap or make some noise if you've ever been pushing a baby stroller or you are wheelchair user or you're riding your bicycle or it's just simply easier to use a curb cut right we've all used these have thing Yeah, let's make some noise. Let's make this interactive. Right? Okay, great. Who doesn't love a bendy straw right and like I have a four year old I'll tell you bendy straws have made it a lot less catastrophic when I tried to give her a drink at a restaurant. bendy straws again. originated in the disability community electric toothbrushes in the disability community who doesn't love a text message right? Text messages, speech to text and closed captions. All of these started in the disability community. So yes, while there are products and services being developed specifically for people with disabilities that might just stay there. There are so many huge technologies and innovations that we all use every single day. That started because they were built with accessibility in mind from the beginning. So my takeaway for you number two is at the how innovation center. We are connecting the communities so that accessibility gets ingrained in the design process from the beginning. And so that we have the chance of getting more impactful innovations like we just saw on the screen before. Okay, so how are we going to go about doing this right? This is a big task. How are we going to do this? Well, we're going to strengthen the startup ego, we're gonna strengthen this ecosystem. And we're doing it four ways. We have a four way strategy here. We're going to do research I'm gonna talk a lot about that. And I'm gonna unveil some really exciting numbers in a minute. We're going to amplify the lived experience. We're going to support innovators and entrepreneurs through a variety of programming and we're going to expand our reach. One of the reasons we are at TechCrunch Disrupt is because a lot of the disability conversation has remained in the disability world. And when I first got to Perkins, people told me go to this conference, go to that conference, go to this conference, and they were all disability focused conferences. And I said, No, we'll do that. But we're also going to go to the tech world and we're going to start bringing this disability inclusion conversation into the tech community. So why research though, right, like why start with something that's very time consuming and can be tough? Well, I will tell you, as the old adage goes, if you can't measure it, you can't improve it right? We've got to start somewhere. So we want to get everyone on the same page. We want to verify, verify and validate the activity. And we want to track our progress so that five years from now we can say hey, the market was this and guess what? Now it's this. So when I first came to Perkins, I knew these innovations were out there like my I, the CEO, Dave power was like, this company came and they have a you know, they're using LIDAR for navigation and I talked to this company, so it's like clean I'm gonna find some market research and I'm gonna start really reaching out to the startups could not find any market research reports that talked about how advanced technologies were being leveraged for people with disabilities. A few news articles, sure. But really, the market research reports were like, analog assistive technologies like this is what the market for walkers, wheelchairs and canes looks like in the year 2030. That's not what I was looking for. So I was actually the first analyst at CBN sites a long time ago. So I kind of like brushed off my like old analyst hat and I don't love Excel, but I just kind of like locked myself in a room and I said, I'm gonna build this database. And I luckily got a co op from Northeastern who did it with me, but we bought 750 identified 750 companies that were using advanced technologies to innovate for people with disabilities. And around this time,

you know, the stars aligned and I was introduced to a team from McKinsey, and I showed them the database and they said, they were like, alright, yeah, let's do this. So they came on, and we turbocharged our they turbocharged our research. And our database now has over 1400 companies innovating for people with disabilities. And we said all right, now let's actually do some analysis here. Today, we are releasing our white paper called defining disability tech, the rise of inclusive innovation, which will have all of the subsequent information in it. At the end of this presentation, there'll be a QR code where you can download the research, but we were like, Okay, we've got our companies. Now we need to, you know, kind of qualify and quantify disability prevalence. So we looked at 10 different market research reports. And then we interviewed people who had been innovating in the space of disability. So we spoke with startup founders and investors who had invested in disability tech to get a better understanding of what the state of the sector is today. And so now, I'm gonna dive in and I'm going to share with you our findings. The first main finding was, what is disability Tech, I couldn't even find a definition I was Googling this and I, you know, people were using the word, I found the word, but I couldn't actually find like a definition for it. And people were all using different words too. So like, one big corporation was using inclusive tech, and another company was using a one on why tech a one on wide stance for accessibility. A lot of folks were using just traditional assistive tech, but I knew it was more than assistive tech. So we worked with our consortium of individuals who and on all of these research reports and today we're putting putting forth this definition of disability tech, which is basically comprising all products and services that improve access, accessibility for people with and without disabilities. So it's assistive technology, which enhances the accessibility of spaces, experiences and activities of daily living. It's adaptive technology, which is usually like a product that modifies an existing device so that a person with a disability can utilize it. And then this is where I personally I think it gets interesting. It's inclusive technology. So these are products and services that improve the accessibility and inclusivity of systems. So think about education, employment, or entertainment, for example. Let's say there's a startup that's using AI to remove bias from the hiring process, right? That there's, there's a ton of them actually really want to know, that company might be targeting diversifying gender in software engineers, for example, it might be let's get more women software engineers, that might be their beachhead market. But if that innovation is successful, it's absolutely going to benefit people. with disabilities as well because it's going to remove bias in the hiring process for them. And so that's why we've brought inclusive technology into the definition.

So now that we have this database and these insights, we can actually start like talking the way the tech community talks and we can start quantifying this market. And disability tech is just a large and growing sector, and it can unlock economic value across the disability spectrum. So our white and this is all in the white paper. But basically on the slide right now are two different vertical column bar graphs. The one on the left shows that over $4 billion went into this sector in early stage investments alone last year, and it was around $500 million in 2014. So you know, significant growth. The second chart shows the projected disability tech market value in the year 2030. Right now and 2023. We're about out about $25 billion. And in 2030, we project it to be a $40 billion market. So what I want folks to take away from this is that we have significant growth and momentum in the disability tech sector. It is real it is growing. In our white paper, we also are proposing a framework for disability tech. So the reason why we did this is because we want the tech industry to understand where the activity is what what's hot, what's not, what's getting attention, and who's operating where. So in our database of 1400 companies. We have each company cataloged according to one of four dimensions. So the first dimension is the end user like what community is this? company trying to serve? isn't trying to serve people with in the visual community, the auditory community, mobility or neurocognitive? Then the second dimension is function. And this is really interesting. It's like, what does this product or service help the user do? Does it help the user navigate? Does it help the customer communicate? Does it help the customer with self care? And all of these by the way are published in the white paper so you can take a deeper look at them. The third dimension is product what form does this product takes? So is it a consumer device? Is it a medical device? And finally, what technology does the product or service use? And this is really interesting and helpful, particularly for researchers. You know, is it using sensors and if so, what kind of sensors is it using? Is it using algorithms or robotics? And so each of these categories has tons and tons of subsets. But this is helpful for a variety of reasons. First and foremost, we're going to measure progress this way. For entrepreneurs this is going to help startups understand who they're competing against out in the market, and maybe learn from past entrepreneurs who had tackled something, it didn't work so well. It's also going to help them find investors for investors is going to help you do due diligence. For corporates. It's going to help you figure out who you can partner with so let's say you own this building that we're in right now and you want to make it more accessible to navigate from breakout room to 123. You would look for some sort of indoor navigation technology. How do you find a list of all of those right? Well, hopefully our database will help help facilitate that. And finally, it's gonna help the community of people with disabilities understand what's out there for them that might be able to open up access. So the distribution in assistive technology, there's a lot of room for improvement. But you know, a lot of it is you know, you go into your regional distributor, and what they have is what you get exposed to, and they might have only 1% of what's on the market. So hopefully our database and these insights that we'll provide to the disability ecosystem will help you know that parent of a child with Usher Syndrome not only find, you know what visual assistive tech devices they might be able to use, but also like what games are accessible to their kid? How can they help their kid learn braille beginning at age three or four? You know, we really want to be able to provide insights to the community as well. Finally, in the paper, we look at do we wanted to kind of see where the whitespace was right? Like where is all this activity? And on the screen right now is what what I call a heat map. But it's essentially like a function. It shows in the I forget my math right but in the y column, on the y axis, it shows all of the different functions that a product can take. So is it a navigation, a communication interaction? And there's there's six of them, and then each of them has a subset to and then across the x axis is the community being served. So what we see here, the boxes that are the most dark there are over 50 companies that we've identified so far operating within this space, and we're seeing just some key takeaways of concentration. So a lot of activity for the visual community in the space of wayfinding and communication, auditory interpretation, mobility, moving and interaction and neurocognitive access to education and communication. We have the same heat map but for what form does the GPA the product or service take? And that's in the white paper. But something I just wanted to point out today is 50% of the companies in the disability tech market. Their hardware company is which I thought was was really fascinating. We can also make a perceptual market maps. So on the screen right now a bunch of company logos and they're clustered according to activity. So the whole top half of the screen all of those companies are innovating for the visually impaired in the space of navigation, some of them the most active sector, most active form that those companies take our medical devices like to think like smart glasses, for example. Then the second biggest activity with around 20 companies and wayfinding apps. So these are apps on your phone that will help you navigate. And then there are three other categories and navigation and then another clustering of companies at the bottom. Really cool one that I the one that I'm partial to is tactile interpretation. So there's around 20 companies innovating in Think of your iPad, right? Imagine if there were pins that could actuate up and down so that you could read Braille on an iPad or you could feel a graph on an iPad or you could feel a photo on an iPad or interpret a map maybe. So lots of activity there. And for all of these companies, not only have we assigned them these four dimensions, but we know where they're located. We know the 400 plus equity investors who have invested in them and so we can start running some just really really cool analysis. We have visualized this database so on the screen right now is a video going of our visual of our of what's behind the data so that you can actually play with it. Once you join our community. You can have access to this as well. We saw bonafide a graph after some user testing so it's more accessible to folks who are visually impaired. So that's companies founded over time and the sound is going up, which is good.

And this was companies I missed which category it was, but it was one subset of the categories. We know the geographic distribution of the companies. So we know how many are in the United States verse, Israel vers India, we're adding to the database every single day. These visualizations are directly plugged into the database, by the way, so when I go in and I put a company in it immediately once once we update it immediately goes to the web, so we don't have static information. So much of these reports out there just like somebody publishes a report and that's it. You know, this is dynamic, and we hope to continue to be able to update this we will be updating this as we proceed. You can also search for companies by end users. So how many companies are innovating for the visually impaired? You can see on this screen right now that companies by product, so wearables versus tablets versus handheld, does that devices, consumer devices, and then we also have engineered this so that the insights are taken. So if you're navigating this with a screen reader, the screen reader will distill the information from the graph. And we didn't build this in a silo. We built this in partnership with three students from the Olin College of Engineering, and around 10 folks from the disability community who we did user testing with for accessibility purposes. So my third and final key takeaway, the opportunity and disability tech, it's big. It's big. It's real, and we're tracking it. And so if you want to be an ally, I just hope that you remember that accessibility matters and the reasoning why it matters. We're connecting the communities and the opportunity is back. I have a final call to action on the screen right now is a QR code, which will lead you to join to sign up and join our community. Once you do that, you'll have access to our data room. So you'll have access to the computer visualizations that you just saw. You'll have access to that perceptual market map. And you'll also have access to our awesome white paper that was just released like now I think it's being published like this moment by our team, which shows all of the numbers behind behind this research. I just, you know, I want to say also, it was just really a pleasure and an honor to be here at TechCrunch. With all of you. We're hosting a networking event tonight. And we would love to have all of you there. So I have some colleagues in the room. Can you raise your hand and make some noise? Okay, so I have like I have a few Oh, good. We're getting some pause. Alright, great. My colleagues, please find them. They can help you register but we're also in the official programming. It's called know how networking for disability inclusion and it's going to be it's going to be awesome. I'm excited about it. And, you know, here's the deal. I know everyone in this room isn't going to go and immediately invest in a disability tech company. I know. You might not go and build a disability tech product, but I do know that over the next few months you will leave this room. And whether you're designing something new at work or you're using something you're going to start thinking about accessibility more. And I hope that you can all become allies in your work and think about people with disabilities as you build the next generation of products and services. So thank you so much. It was such a pleasure to be here. Wow. And I don't know where I am on time, but if I do have time, I'm happy to take up a question or two. Any questions from the audience? Yes. We have a microphone that's going to come over.

So you've mentioned how you're working really hard to build that database. My question is, you know this, how do you get the special needs community to participate in these research on, you know, research methods, since that is something very sensitive for the families and to the folks who have the disabilities.

Yes, that's an excellent question. So I do have someone on our team right now, who's actually been conducting a significant number of interviews with people with different disabilities to understand what would motivate and incentivize them to participate in primary market research and user testing. We are going to be distilling those findings within the next four weeks, I would say. We wanted to go on a listening tour and really understand you know, what does motivate people to give their feedback, right? I'll be very candid. I worked for six years in blockchain. And sometimes people would say, hey, we want to pick your brain about cryptocurrency. We'll give you $25 And I was like, no thanks. And then sometimes people would say, we'll give you $1,200 to talk to us about crypto and I'll be like, 45 minutes. Let's do that. That sounds like a good idea. You know, everyone's motivated by something different, right? And in the disability space, there's a lot of personal motivation as well. We are hoping to build a community of people with disabilities that makes it easier for entrepreneurs and innovators to co design with and we are working through a variety of different ways that we do that. One of the things I really want to do is I want to standardize compensation. Because what happens a lot is people say, Oh, we want to talk to you and get your your feedback on your lived experience with your disability. Don't you just want to do it because it's going to make your life better? And the answer is no time is valuable, and people should be compensated for their time. So we want to so we want to standardize that as well. But we're in the very early stages and we're still just learning and researching and better understanding from the community. What would what, what they want. Yeah. Yes, against against the wall over there.

First, I want to say this research is incredible. And from the disability community. Thank you. I'm on the board of the victor Penina Foundation. And I work at the UN Human Rights team and I work with together International, the leading startup accelerator for disabled founders, and I just think this is the most incredible research I was curious about. Of the companies that you are looking at how what percentage is founded by persons with disabilities?

It's a great question. Well, first of all, thank you so much. I'm actually seeing Diego in in DC and a few weeks. We haven't run that analysis yet. And that's actually like the other side of of the situation right? I when I first stepped into the role, I was like, Oh, do I focus on technologies for people with disabilities? Or do we focus on entrepreneurs with disabilities, right like there. There are tons of entrepreneurs out there building products and services, they have a disability, but they're building like a travel startup or a you know, a dating app or something. And it's not necessarily in the disability space. So it's different. I can tell you that the research shows, founders with disabilities are 400 times less likely to receive funding 400 times less likely to receive funding. I can also tell you that as an industry, we have actually done a really bad job of tracking disability. So, you know, you look at the you know how many VCs are women, it's like one out of 10 VCs is a woman. Seven out of 10 VCs went to Stanford or Harvard. You can't even find how many VCs have a disability because we haven't even started tracking it yet. And that's changing. But we need to start talking about this right. And I've kind of said this before, you know, like the DEI movement, we had, you know, we had the meat to movement and that like, kind of got us somewhere. I'm still trying to figure out where but you know, it was something right for women in tech. And then, you know, in 2022, in 2020, we had the murder of George Floyd and that kind of centered a conversation around racial injustice in this country. But disability hasn't actually had that like cultural watershed moment that like ripples across the country and everyone says, oh, we gotta pay attention. To this. And I hope it never has to because those are tragedies and I don't want them to happen. But I think we can just get ahead of it. Right. disability has been an afterthought of dei initiatives. It's something like 94% of companies that have a dei initiative don't include disability in it, I think it's like only 6% of them have thought about even including disability, so we can do better. And it just starts by working together and amplifying the message right. Any other questions? There's a gentleman in the red in the back that if we can get the mic to him.

Thank you, um, early on in the presentation, you showed that there was $13 $13 trillion of spend, and then later on, it was about $25 billion market cap. Can you speak to that gap?

Yes. The $25 billion market valuation those are startups in disability tech, what they are valued at the $13 trillion figure is how much money people with disabilities and their allies control and annual disposable income. So they're just two different figures. You know, when I saw the $13 trillion figure at first I was like, Well, what are allies? Like? Like, is it like seven people or is it like, you know, how many people is is is an ally to a person with a disability, and the ratio is actually for every one person with a disability. They include 1.85 people as allies. I don't know what point eight five of a person is, but that's where the number comes from. So it's not like for every one person they're counting five people worth of you know, their annual disposable income. It's actually a pretty low, low figure. All right. Okay. I'm being told I have time. I'm going to be standing outside. So if anybody wants to talk further. I also just want to say we're looking for partners to make all of this happen. So if you think you can help accelerate innovation in the space of disability technology, please come find me and some of my colleagues standing outside the session. Thank you all so much for taking the time. It was a pleasure to be here.