Spotlight: Cooking Up Independence with Brava’s Accessible Smart Oven

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VOICEOVER: Spotlight: Cooking Up Independence – Brava’s Accessible Smart Oven. Speakers: Travis Rea, VP of Sales and Marketing, Brava. Zac Selmon, Product Manager, Brava. Sam Seavey, Content Creator, The Blind Life.

TRAVIS REA: Hello. My name is Travis Rea, and I am the vice president of sales and marketing at Brava. I want to thank the Vista Center for inviting us here today to showcase some of the most exciting advancements in assistive cooking technology that have come about in years. Before we begin, I’d like to share a little bit about my background. I actually started my career, um, over 20 years ago in cooking and fine dining, and then I transferred over to doing a number of different projects from Williams-Sonoma to a few other different companies doing food product development. So, um, my whole career’s been spent around helping people cook, and specifically to help them cook at home. And I joined Brava back in 2017, back when we were building the product.

Brava, at the core, is a smart oven that has some very unique technology behind it that allows it to do things that other ovens can’t do. Um, and so we set out on this mission back in 2017 to help people cook at home with more ease and more convenience than ever before. Um, and it turned out that a lot of the things that we had built into the oven from the very beginning turned out to have an elevated level of importance for people with disabilities. And so we’ve spent the last couple of years making Brava accessible, more accessible for people with disabilities, and specifically, recently, we made it accessible for people that are blind and visually impaired.

So I’d like to introduce our speakers for this Spotlight session today. We have Zac Selmon from Brava, who’s the head of product, and we also have Sam Seavey from The Blind Life. And they’re going to take you through what Brava is, how it works, and then really dive into some of the assistive technology features that we’ve developed. Zac, you want to take it away?

ZAC SELMON: Yeah. Awesome. Thank you, Travis. And thank you, Sam, for being here. Um, so quickly, I just want to kind of go through what Brava is. Um, so Brava is a smart oven. So it’s a countertop oven. Um, it’s about the size of a toaster oven. A lot of people say it looks like a desktop printer. Um, but what’s cool about it is that it’s really an automated cooking solution. So it cooks for you. It’s kind of what Waymo or self-driving cars have done, but for the kitchen.

Um, the way that it works is really interesting. Most ovens, you’re using heating elements to charge the entire chamber with a fixed, consistent temperature range. Um, Brava actually cooks with these very special lamps. So it cooks with light. And there’s three lamps that go along the bottom of it and three lamps along the top, and they have these special reflectors that focus all of the energy. Instead of going into the entire chamber, it focuses the energy like a spotlight, or kind of like a magnifying glass, so it’s all getting focused directly into the food.

Um, and from a cooking standpoint, the benefit that that gets us is, one, it gets us safer access to a lot more cooking power. Um, traditional ovens usually top out around 500 degrees, and we can cook at about 900 degrees. So things you can’t normally cook in an oven, like getting a hard sear on a steak, things you’d normally do on a stovetop or a grill, we have that level of power. Um, it reaches that level of power in just under a second, so there’s no preheating time. And also, because we’re not heating the whole chamber, when we cut the lamps, it stops cooking, so you don’t have to rush to get the food out.

Um, the last cool thing about it is that, because we have the three lamps on top and bottom, they create these three independent cooking zones. Um, so what you see here is we’ve got these special trays that go into the oven and correspond to the three lamps, and we can cook in those three zones independently. So you can put chicken breasts in the middle zone, you can put potatoes in the top zone and broccoli in the bottom zone, and the lamps will coordinate so that they pulse and cook each zone independently, coordinated so that it all comes out at the same time. Um, so it’ll start by hitting the top of the chicken really hard to sear it, and then the bottom, and then it’ll back off. While it’s resting to temp, it’ll start roasting the potatoes. Um, and that is all driven by software. So we’ve got 9,000 recipes that Travis and our chef team have built out. Um, it handles all the cooking and sets it up perfectly for you.

Some cool cooking benefits of it is that, in addition to the no preheat, it cooks really fast. Um, because we can pulse the lamps, we can keep very fine control over the surface temperature to get just the right amount of roasting without overcooking it, and that lets us cook really fast. Um, and to give you kind of just a rough sense of what the cooking experience is like with those 9,000 recipes, basically you’ll search and find what you want to cook. Say you want to make a filet mignon. It’ll ask you what size the steak is, if you like it medium rare or medium well, and based on the selections that you make, it walks you through how you assemble it onto our tray, and then you press a button. It cooks it for you. You get a notification when it’s done.

Um, so kind of how we got here, as Travis mentioned, we started off just trying to make cooking faster, easier for everyone. And then a handful of years later, we started hearing from folks… Kind of originally we started hearing from a bunch of folks aging in place. We hadn’t anticipated the older demographic being super interested in this kind of really high tech cooking method. Um, but we started… Some of our most vocal proponents were older folks and folks trying to age in place.

Um, and then a few years ago, we started hearing from, or we started selling a bunch of ovens to an agency out of Massachusetts. And traditionally, we’ve been only direct to consumer. We weren’t selling a lot of B2B. Um, and so we reached out. We’re like, “What’s going on here?” It turns out that they were an agency helping folks with various developmental disabilities to live independently. And they opened our eyes to the fact that a lot of these features that are great for everybody are more important for people that have some challenges, right? Um, so the fact that it’s safe to touch on the outside, that everything’s guided, that it can automatically shut off. Um, that for people that have a harder time in the kitchen, it can really improve some of those experiences for them. And because it’s driven by software, we can update it and tweak it and make it better.

Um. So, we started leaning in, trying to learn all the stuff that we didn’t know. And we started going to various conferences and trying to talk to people. And a couple years ago, we went to our first ATIA. Um, and while presenting there, that’s where we started hearing that the touch screen, which is how you traditionally control the oven, was the least accessible part of the oven experience. At that ATIA, I can’t remember if that’s where I first met you, Sam, but that’s where I first saw a screen reader and how that worked. Um, and so we met folks like Sam. We talked to people, kind of explained how that would work and started trying to get a wish list of what we could build out.

And then we spent basically an entire year, we had to rebuild our entire backend so that you could control everything about the oven using the app. And then once we had that set up, then we started working with folks like Sam and with the Lighthouse in San Francisco to rework our app so that it works cleanly with screen readers, with VoiceOver and TalkBack. And we launched that… Gee, when was that, Travis? Right at the very end of last year. Um. And, um, yeah. It’s been cool. We got one to Sam as quick as possible, and Sam was great. He pointed out a bunch of problems with it right away. Um. It was super helpful.

TRAVIS REA: Let’s introduce Sam so that the audience knows sort of how we got together and what Sam does.

ZAC SELMON: Yeah. Oh, hey.

SAM SEAVEY: Well, first of all, thanks guys, for having me. I truly appreciate it. I’m excited to see you guys again. Yeah. Like you said, I keep seeing you at conferences all the time. Which I really appreciate. But I’m excited to talk about Brava. Um. So, anybody out there that doesn’t know who I am, I’m an assistive technology specialist. And for the last 13 years, which is kind of crazy to think about, I’ve had a YouTube channel called The Blind Life, where I review accessible products and adaptive equipment, accessible software, all of that. Basically everything having to do with low vision.

And that… Attending all these conferences is, like Zac said, that’s the first time I ran across you guys. And I was impressed right away. Um, not only… We’re gonna talk about the device itself, but I was impressed right at the beginning of your dedication to making your product accessible for us. You know, a lot of companies, they wanna make things accessible and they kind of go just far enough to check the box. “All right. We’ve did it.” Um, but you guys have really gone above and beyond. And I truly appreciate that, and I thank you from our community. I just wanna make sure to let you guys know that. I really appreciate it.

ZAC SELMON: Well, thank you. We try. I mean, it’s hard, right? ‘Cause there’s still so many things that I wanna make better, right? And there’s so many things that I know are still not there yet. And that’s where working with folks like you and hearing from the community is so helpful, right? ‘Cause there’s so many things you don’t know until somebody points them out, right? And that kind of collaboration is has been so important for us to try to keep making things better.

SAM SEAVEY: Yeah. What were some of the biggest challenges that you had in the development of the screen reader software?

ZAC SELMON: Um. So, I mean, I think there’s the first and foremost, right? There’s… And the problem that I run into when I first tried to learn, right? There’s a lot of resources out there for traditional user experience design and trying to simplify things. There’s less of that for screen reader support. And a lot of things is just around getting bare bones, like, is the content there? And not about streamlining workflows. Um, for something like this oven, we want people cooking with it multiple times a day. And so I don’t… You wanna reduce the number of interactions and clicks so that the time to open the app and cook your egg for breakfast isn’t overwhelming. Um, but at the same time, it just like any UI, it needs to be easily understandable for people their first time as well as for people that are doing it for the hundredth time.

Um, and there’s not as many resources or kind of best practices out there as there should be. Um, I don’t know if you have things to add to that, Sam. But that’s, that was kind of my experience, especially starting off and it was invaluable being able to talk to people that have those experiences and have run through those problems themselves.

SAM SEAVEY: Yeah. No, I can’t imagine how difficult it was, as you said, coming from a place of not knowing anything about screen readers, barely knowing anything about our community to begin with, having to kind of jump feet first and dive all in and figure it all out as quickly as you can. Uh, and you guys did a great job. Even when I first got my hands on it and, as you said, I noticed a couple of things within the app that didn’t work right, there were a couple of issues with how the app rendered certain things due to some of the accessibility settings I had turned on, and I gave you guys that feedback and you addressed it very, very quickly. So, all in all, I think you did a phenomenal job and I easily can say that this is by far my most favorite product that I’ve reviewed this year, 2025, hands down. And I use it all the time. My wife, my family and I, we love it, it’s been fantastic.

ZAC SELMON: Wow, man.

TRAVIS REA: Can you describe, Sam… maybe what is it about the Brava… I mean, aside from the screen reader experience, are there other advantages to using it compared to some of the other existing cooking technologies that were out there? ‘Cause obviously for the past 13 years since you started your channel, you’ve been cooking. So what can you describe a little bit about the difference between what it was like before and what it’s like now?

SAM SEAVEY: Sure, yeah. And I should also mention that I spent about 15 years working in restaurants. I was a prep chef, so I’ve got a pretty extensive history of cooking as well. I, calling myself a chef I think is a bit of a stretch but, you know. Um, so I love cooking, I love baking, all of that. Um, and that’s one thing I really enjoy about the Brava is, setting aside the accessibility, I’m gonna talk about that, but just as a product you use in the kitchen, it really takes the guesswork out of cooking. Um, I mean, it’s so easy to use and the results, you get fantastic results every single time and the results are repeatable.

You know, if I go to make a, roast some veggies, for example, traditionally in my oven. You know, it might turn out great the first time and then the second time, well, maybe I undercooked them a little bit or maybe I overcooked them, or I didn’t season them, you know, the best. But Brava really, because it’s very plug-and-play, it’s like I’m following a recipe, I push the button, the machine does everything for me. It knows when to stop cooking, it knows the right temperature for it. So I don’t have to deal with any of that. And the speed, you know, it might take me 40 minutes or so to roast veggies traditionally in the oven with the preheat time and everything. And with Brava, it’s like 19 minutes and I’m eating my veggies. It’s fantastic.

Um, but then, you know, throwing in the accessibility to where I can do all of that independently by myself and I don’t have to go get one of my sighted supporters to help me, it’s really been a great addition to our kitchen.

TRAVIS REA: Zac, do you wanna talk a little bit about some of the safety features that we had built in from the beginning that sort of got us down on this path with that agency in Massachusetts and some of the things that they were talking about?

ZAC SELMON: Yeah. I mean, so from a safety standpoint, I think one is just like if you have a normal toaster oven, if you’re cooking at 400, 450, 500 degrees, those are gonna get really hot on the outside. Um, and so that was one of the things… We were originally thinking about, you know, for little kids cooking with it and things like that, that we really wanted to make it so that it remains safe to touch on the outside. And because the energy is so focused, um, it’s something that we can do. It’ll get warm, but it’s never gonna burn you, and I think that is a really important one.

That, and then the automatic shut off is great. That’s one of my favorite features personally, just because, you know, you’re making dinner at night and then my kids start fighting in the back room and I’ve burned things plenty of times. And so being able to rely on that, know that it’s gonna shut off automatically. Same with the no preheat, there’s just some of these little things that, until you’re, until you have it, you don’t realize how much additional friction some of those things have in the cooking process.

And for me personally, you know, Sam mentioned roasting veggies. That’s what I do a lot more than before I had it, right? It’s easy to just throw a tray of broccoli in there and I’m just really… It’s one of my favorite features about Brava. And the combination of safety, and the ease of use, and the speed, it’s just enough of those edges, takes a little bit of the edge off of those and makes it more likely that I’m gonna do it.

TRAVIS REA: There’s other products already that auto shut off like a microwave and there’s even some ovens that auto shut off. But why is it that Brava’s auto shut off is unique relative to a traditional oven, and more useful?

ZAC SELMON: Well, if you think about the microwave and the oven. And, you know, microwave, when it shuts off, the microwave doesn’t stay hot so you don’t have to get the food out right away. Um, whereas in an oven, even if it shuts off, the oven stays hot for a while. If you don’t get your food out, it’s gonna dry out or keep cooking. Um, Brava’s kind of in between the two. So like the microwave, it’s not gonna keep cooking or dry out your food. Um, but in a microwave, you’re kind of steaming your food from the inside out, so you’re never gonna get that roasted caramelization, whereas Brava’s using actual infrared heat. So you’re gonna get that quality, but with the speed and convenience factor that you might get from a microwave.

TRAVIS REA: Oh, do you guys wanna talk about, you know, Brava today is nearly fully accessible for people that are blind and visually impaired, but there’s one caveat to that. Do you wanna talk about that a little bit?

ZAC SELMON: Yes. I mean, there’s a handful of things. And what’s been great, you know, Sam mentioned when we first started getting his feedback, he was really helpful. There were things like, okay, we focused on trying to get the screen reader support working, but then there’s some conflicts between some of the magnification and some of those screen reader support. So work through some of that. Um, then some of the other things that we run into are some of the diagnostic features that are available on the oven for troubleshooting Wi-Fi issues. There’s a lot of inside baseball things, and we’re constantly working through improving those.

Um, the big one right now that we’re working on is that it does require sighted assistance for initial setup, because we didn’t plan for this originally, and this kills me, but right now to do the initial connecting the oven up to Wi-Fi and getting it logged in so that your phone can control it, that all happens on the touch screen on the oven. Um, I don’t have a solution for that. We’re working on that actively right now. We’re playing with some new things. That gets into a whole different set of learning experiences, learning how to control Bluetooth settings and Wi-Fi settings and all that kinda stuff in an accessible way. Um, but we’re working through all of that right now.

Um, as we’ve gotten more and more users over the past year, we’re constantly trying to fix little edge cases and things like that. So, for example, things like how the sound effects behave in relation to controls from the oven, when the button presses happen, relative to some of the sound effects. Um, so basically, the big thing is communication and collaboration, right? We’re trying to make it easy for our community to submit feature requests and point out bugs and, you know, complain about things or tell us what they like, because the more feedback and the more we understand different use cases, the more we can kind of tweak things. Um, it’s really helpful the more we hear from folks.

Um, I can kinda talk about some of the fun things that we’re working on too. This isn’t out yet and I don’t know when it’s gonna be out, but we’ve got it in beta right now, leveraging some of the new AI tools that are out there so that… Like right now, it works with a screen reader, um, but we’re building out chat support so that you can actually have a conversation with it and talk through, “Hey, I’m looking to cook some steak. Will you suggest some recipes?” And then it’ll just guide you through that way, so that you can have a truly hands-free experience. Um, and I think that that can be really fun. And that’s actually something that was cool that we heard from one of our users where she had just naturally gone straight to ChatGPT to ask some questions, right? And so we’re working to get that built into the app that I think will be really exciting.

I don’t know. Sam, do you have any thoughts or questions or suggestions that we should be adding or updating?

SAM SEAVEY: Um, no. Like I said, I… You know, I use it all the time, and it just, it’s just a seamless experience thus far. Um, and for anybody that’s watching this, Sight Tech Global, and they’re curious about what the accessibility is, I’ll just kinda give a real brief overview. So through the app… And this is one thing also that I commend you guys on because generally, in the blind and visually impaired community, we focus on basically three categories of accessibility. You’ve got visual enhancements, auditory enhancements, and tactile enhancements. So you guys are utilizing some of all three with the Brava, which I absolutely love.

Uh, so you’ve got the screen reader support through the app. And through the app, you can do just about everything with the oven as far as cooking and searching recipes and creating your own custom recipes or custom cooks, as you guys say. Um, and that’s great. But for low vision users, the app is very high contrast, especially if you have some of your visual enhancements turned on on your phone. Then it’s large print. It’s high contrast. You guys are using color contrast really well to indicate important things. Like, you know, when you’re cooking hot dogs and it says, “Well, how many hot dogs do you want?” You know, whenever you click on it, it changes color to indicate this is the choice you’ve chosen, which is great.

And then the tactile enhancements of the machine itself, the trays have raised indicators of the zones that’s important to know for when you’re placing your food. You know, certain food goes on a certain zone, especially if you’re having multiple food on one tray, multiple types of food on one tray. You’ve gotta put ’em in the right zone and make sure they’re in the zone. And because you have the raised elements on the tray, that’s super easy for somebody without vision. Then you’ve got the two rows, or levels that you can put the trays onto. Once again, super easy to do that just by feel. Even putting in the temperature probe or the thermometer, once again, very easy to do just by touch. So, you know…

Oh, even the button, on the machine itself. Yes, the touchscreen, terrible for accessibility. I mentioned that, the first thing I told you guys whenever you sent it to me. But the button that you do to, once you send your cook from the app to the Brava, you have to press that physical button to start the cooking, but even that’s tactile. So, all in all, you know, really done a great job with the accessibility overall, I think.

ZAC SELMON: Thank you. Thank you. I think that’s, it’s kind of interesting, so some of that stuff, like the trays and the physical button, those are things that are kind of happy accidents that we shouldn’t plan those out from an accessibility standpoint. But I do think it highlights one of the things that I’ve learned the most from this adventure over the past couple years, is that accessible design is better for everyone. And the more that you think through different users’ needs and use cases, it’s making it a better product for our sighted users, for everybody, the more that you accommodate these kinds of things. And so a lot of the features that we have built out for the screen reader are the favorite features of our existing users who have had the ovens for years. Um, and just taking that kind of mentality into product design, in general, I think has been such an important learning for me as a product person, and as a person, I guess, right? That it’s not doing it just for one group. It’s making it better for everyone, which I think is important.

SAM SEAVEY: Yeah, absolutely. Universal design. It works.

ZAC SELMON: Well, it does. It does. It does. It’s been great to learn.

TRAVIS REA: Yeah, I mean, I personally couldn’t have imagined even, you know, five years ago, thinking that we would be here today and having made Brava more accessible for people with disabilities, much less people that are blind or visually impaired. It was never really part of the road map, you know? And we set out, like I said in the beginning, to help people cook at home with more ease and convenience and speed than ever before. But I think when we realized that we were helping people that couldn’t cook by traditional means or had challenges cooking with traditional equipment, like a regular stove and oven and things like that, when we found that we were making a difference and that people were cooking more at home because we were enabling them to do so, that meant a lot to us as a company and to me personally. And I think we just decided to lean into it ’cause it was the right thing to do. Um, so I’m excited that we’re here too.

Um, a couple of things. We’re about to run out of time so I wanted to wrap it up, but point out a couple of things. If you guys wanna take a deeper dive into Sam’s experience with Brava, he has a couple of videos on his YouTube channel, one that specifically highlights the app, and another longer one that highlights the oven and some of its functions too. Um, so make sure that you go to The Blind Life and just search for Brava, and those two videos should pop up pretty quickly.

Um, it’s probably also wise to tell you where you can find Brava. You can go to www.brava.com. Um, we’re in the process of actually building out and making our accessibility pages much more robust, so be looking for that in the future. Um, you can also find Brava, we just recently partnered with Innosearch, so we have a dedicated storefront on Innosearch if you wanna go and look for it there. Um, and it’s also at Amazon and williamssonoma.com and other, a few other online retailers. Um, but before we wrap it up, do you guys, Sam or Zac, have any sort of last thoughts to share with the audience before we depart?

SAM SEAVEY: Well, I can say that I am very excited to use the Brava to supplement the cooking this Thanksgiving. Um, you know, it’s gonna make that whole full day of cooking, it’s gonna speed up a lot of that, and I’m excited to check it out. It’s nice to be able to be cooking when you have something in your regular oven so that the oven doesn’t become the regular oven doesn’t become the wall that you have to get through to get everything on the table at the same time.

ZAC SELMON: Absolutely. I just wanna say thank you to the folks at the Vista Center, and thank you so much, Sam, for all your help over the last couple years. It’s been, you know, it’s been great. Really, really appreciate it, bud.

SAM SEAVEY: My pleasure.

TRAVIS REA: Huge thanks to Sam and a special thanks to the Vista Center, the leadership team, the Sight Tech Global conference. Um, it’s really been an honor to be here, and we thank you guys very much.

SAM SEAVEY: Yeah, thanks everybody.

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