Archives: Sessions

Nearly four years ago, Salesforce stepped ahead in the tech and corporate world by announcing the formation of an Office of Accessibility, charged with pulling together all the strands of accessibility across the CRM giant, including workforce development, product development and design, and customer relations. Sight Tech Global touched base with the fledgling effort in 2020 and in this session we’ll hear what the accessibility team has learned after three years work to ensure every aspect of Salesforce embraces accessibility.

With new partnerships to lean on and generative AI looking to make their dynamic tactile display more useful than ever, the founders of the DOT pad return to Sight Tech Global to discuss how their vision for the breakthrough device is fast evolving, including a new, faster Dot Pad that can refresh in the blink of an eye.

Did that mechanical voice just say it’s safe to cross the street? It’s a dilemma every blind person faces when they are about to step off the curb. What if the camera on the back of your mobile phone could assess the signals and your path to make a crossing safer? A small team of AI engineers at the startup AYES took on that challenge and created the OKO app, which uses computer-vision-based AI to “read” the signals and suggest when it’s safe to cross. How does the app work and just how safe is it?

Microsoft’s Saqib Shaikh co-founded the Seeing AI app, which was one of the first deployments of AI computer vision in an app to help blind users “narrate the world around you” by using AI to describe nearby people, text and objects. Shaikh’s employer, Microsoft, is a leading investor in OpenAI, the organization that created the ground-breaking chatGPT, a type of AI called “generative” because of its ability to “generate” novel content in response to questions. Today, Seeing AI can tell you there is a chair in the room because it is “trained”  to identify a chair. With chatGPT, Seeing AI might be able to answer a random question it was not specifically trained for, such as,”Is there a cat in the room?” The answers chatGPT provides can be wondrous or wildly off base “hallucinations,” in the lingo of AI specialists. Can generative AI’s quirky nature be tamed for accessibility?

At Sight Tech Global two years ago, we unveiled the ARIA AT initiative, which aimed to address the frustrating, damaging reality that screen readers are not interoperable on the Web, unlike their cousins for sighted users – browsers like Chrome and Safari. In other words,any developer that takes accessibility seriously has to test their code on JAWS, VoiceOver, NVDA and the rest. In this session, the people advancing the ARIA AT project  are back with a refresher, progress to report, and a call to action.

“Where is my flying car?” is a longstanding Silicon Valley lament. Almost here, is the answer, and the startup Wisk is one of many startups closing in on that promise with an autonomous (no pilot), electric, 12-prop four-seater that’s more or less like a flying Waymo, only it will initially fly only pre-set routes to destinations like LAX airport from locations around LA. Beat the traffic, right? What’s remarkable about Wisk is how they are building accessibility into the Wisk experience from the start. That narrow staircase for passengers? Guide dogs need something wider. Check.

For years, technologists have experimented with ways to assemble powerful new technologies like computer vision, digital navigation, and a variety of  sensors to help blind and visually impaired people navigate more easily. Former Microsoft engineer Amos Miller, who is blind himself, had an idea: why not create a device that uses multi-modal AI technology to guide users by attaching the familiar concept of a cane to a small, two-wheel assembly that guides with steering and brakes a user to their destination? Could people, especially those who lose their vision later in life, easily afford the device and use it right out of the box? That’s what Miller aims to deliver with Glidance.

Immediately after this session, Amos Miller will be available for live questions in a breakout session listed in the agenda.

To lose one’s sight to the unpredictable course of retinitis pigmentosa is an experience many people with sight loss know all too well. In the US alone, there are an estimated 100,000 people with the condition, but there are not many who happen to be authors and journalists of considerable skill who can relate in a wonderfully compelling detail the very personal experience of  losing their sight while also starting a family, maintaining social and work connections, and navigating the many perspectives on blindness swirling in the American scene. Only human, not artificial, intelligence is on tap for this conversation with the author of the remarkable new book, “The Country of the Blind.”