 Thank you. So as introduced, I'm Ann Marie Slaughter. I'm the CEO of New America. I really share the leadership of New America with Paul Butler there at the back who is our President and Chief Transformation Officer. So it's wonderful to have all of you here. Many of you will have seen, if you had your cup of coffee, that we are dedicated to renewing the promise of America, which is of obviously a grand mission. We think of it as the promise with a capital P, the promise that is embedded in the Declaration of Independence, that we certainly did not live up to at that moment, but we strive to live up to and we continue to strive a promise of equality and of equal rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and to a government of the people dedicated to the safety and welfare of that people. That's the part of the Declaration people often don't read, but it's in there, too. As we approach our 250th anniversary in 2026, we will be a very different America for the next 250 years. We will be a far more diverse America and it is our commitment and our mission to see that we are an America where everyone is seen. We have work to do going back to acknowledge all the Americans who were ignored or oppressed or excluded or rendered invisible. That's important historical work, but going forward everybody has to be at the table from the beginning, and that's why this work is so important and so much at the heart of what we're about, because disabled Americans have been not seen, as I don't have to tell you, even until really quite recently, even as we have had wave after wave of inclusion, this work is really at the heart of ensuring that all Americans have equal opportunity, but equally important, that we as Americans as a country and as a world get to benefit from the talents of all Americans. It works both ways. This particular part of education and technology and disability and putting those together to deliver this promise is, as I said, it's a it's a it's newer work for us, but absolutely critical to how Paul and I see this organization developing, and really it's it's our education program is essential to everything. One of the biggest lessons I learned when I took over New America 10 years ago and I was from national security is that I now think early education is a national security issue. I think that the ability of all Americans, all people in our schools, to have an equal shot at having brains develop in ways that enable them to learn for the rest of their lives and to contribute for the rest of their lives is every bit as important as our defense budget, and I feel we're up to me. I would do a little shifting, but so as we look at our education program, birth to workforce, we're working to ensure that all students have access to excellent teaching. I've already talked to a couple of you about that, teaching and learning from birth through workforce, and of course workforce, as I approach my 65th birthday, I think workforce just keeps extending lifelong, and we're particularly focused on designing systems improvements and innovations with students with disabilities in mind again from the start, right? This cannot be the afterthought that we squeeze in that we work in. This is true for us for all policy. You have to have the people who are at the center of that policy at the center of the conversation from the beginning. Otherwise, you get fancy solutions designed and maybe implemented, maybe not, but even when they are, they often don't work. So from the beginning, and this here, this conference, intersects that idea of being there from the beginning with technology, education, and disability as sort of the three parts of that conversation. We're particularly thrilled to be partnering with the Department of Education on this event. It's, we love our location because we're right at the heart of the, at least around all the executive departments, and I also, before I turn it over to Ellery Robinson from the Department of Education, I want to thank our entire education team, particularly our higher ed team and our pre-K through 12, Elena Silva and her team, and also the New America events team that has worked very hard to make this, this event so that we live our commitments as accessible as possible and as inclusive as possible. So thank you all. I'll be able to stay at least for the first hour, and I'll be hearing about the rest of it. Ellery, thank you so much. Hi, everyone. Thank you so much, Anne-Marie. It's so great that you could join us and share about your work with New America. I am Ellery Robinson. I am an Impact Fellow in the U.S. Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology. The Office of EdTech develops national ed tech policy, establishes the vision for how technology can be used to transform teaching and learning, and how to make everywhere all the time learning possible for early education, K through 12, higher education, and adult education. As you all know, since you're here, the Office of EdTech has partnered with New America on how we can design excessively from the start. I'm really excited to spend the day with all of you learning from and working with experts in this area. We are really honored to have our next speaker, the Assistant Secretary of Planning Evaluation and Policy Development at the U.S. Department of Education, Roberto Rodriguez. Roberto's previous work includes Deputy Assistant for Education to President Barack Obama, Chief Counsel to Senator Edward Kennedy, and President and CEO of Teach Plus. As the Assistant Secretary, Roberto oversees numerous offices, including the Office of EdTech, leads the development and review of the department's budget, and advises the Secretary on all matters related to policy development, implementation, and review. Thank you so much for joining us, and please give a welcome to Roberto. It's great to be here with all of you in person, and those of you joining virtually as well. I'm so grateful to the New America team, Ann Marie, and the amazingly talented education team here for bringing us all together, and for their collaboration with our U.S. Department of Education and our administration on this important work. I just need to note, none of this would be possible. We wouldn't be here today without two individuals from my team that I really want to just acknowledge and applaud. First is Aurelie Robinson, who you just heard from. Thank you, Aurelie, for your leadership. And the other is our outstanding Deputy Director of the Office of Educational Technology, Christina Ishmael, who's here. Christina, thank you for all you do. It is really wonderful to see such a diverse audience with us today. Really ready to roll their sleeves up and learn from each other, and bake accessibility into ed tech together. We have participants today on our agenda, our researchers, our policy makers, our individuals with disabilities, our practitioners, our advocates, all coming together to really underscore the importance of equitable access to educational technology. We know how important this topic is to our future. We know what a challenge the pandemic exposed to see the impacts of inequitable access to technology exposed even further. So, you know, that really helped us show how far we have yet to travel to create equitable environments for all of our learners. And today you have an opportunity with a great agenda planned to learn from those at the forefront of this work, to more importantly learn from those who are experiencing and living accessibility and inaccessibility in ed tech each and every day. We need to center those voices first and foremost in the work that we're exploring today. While our administration continues to focus on accessible education for all learners, we know that this work does not get done without each and every one of you in partnership. This is an all hands on deck moment that we have to seize. So, I want to thank each and every one of you for the role you play in our collective efforts toward greater accessibility in ed tech. At the Department of Education, we believe that technology is a bridge for improving opportunity, for improving outcomes in education for all learners. We're guided by three priorities in that work through our Office of Educational Technology. We're focused on digital inclusion, on doing more to make sure that we have accessible opportunities for incorporating technology into the lives and learning of all of our students and individuals. We're focused secondly on learning ecosystems, on building and supporting thriving and effective learning ecosystems and environments where education through technology reaches the lives and learning of more of our individuals, and to support our educators and those working directly with our students and individuals in that work. Thirdly, we're focused on emergent technologies. This is an area that's really exciting for the topic we're exploring today to make sure that those emergent technologies are supporting safe, effective and equitable opportunities. If not integrated correctly, we also know that technology can increase barriers, particularly for our learners with disabilities. So, as technology becomes a larger part of everyday life and learning, it's increasingly important that effective technology is accessible for all learners. We know, if we look across the country in our schools and in our districts, that the average number of tech products that our school districts use in a given month has almost tripled over the past several years. Students themselves use an average of 143 ed tech tools each school year. However, our individuals with disabilities consistently face a digital divide and a digital divide that's been compounded by inequitable access, as they're three times more likely to never go online than our individuals without disabilities. So, given that one in four of our adults and 15% of our public school students have a documented disability, this is a must-do. It is critical that we focus on accessibility as our North Star in this work around supporting educational technology. And that we center the voices of our learners, of our educators, of our employees with disabilities. Their expertise, their experience, their input to this work is critical. This is why we've dedicated at the Office of Educational Technology to focusing on our students with disabilities and our individuals with disabilities on providing full access for technology and to advancing their experiences in the work around our vision for accessibility. That vision is embedded in the framework that our Secretary of Education, Miguel Cardona, has talked about relative to raising the bar and supporting success for all learners. And we're really fortunate at the U.S. Department of Education to have several levers available to demonstrate our commitment to accessibility. The first of those are those strategic investments that we make at the department each and every day. We have made historic investments in supporting our districts and our states and our institutions of higher learning as they emerge from this pandemic, right, $130 billion through the American Rescue Plan for our K-12 districts. A tremendous amount of funding for our institutions of higher education to keep those doors of higher learning open for more students as they worked through and emerged from the pandemic. And at our Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services and our Institute of Educational Sciences, we are also running discretionary grant programs to develop accessible ed tech specifically for learners with disabilities in mind. Secondly, we are using the lever of our policy and guidance as a key driver in this work. Our agency continues to issue guidance on topics like accessibility and student privacy, mental health and professional development to ensure a more thoughtful approach to technology implementation in our classrooms. Our Office of Educational Technology recently issued a report that I am very proud of around artificial intelligence in teaching and learning, including a conversation that that report begins on how tools can be appropriately deployed in the service of effective teaching and learning practices for our students with disabilities. I hope that this is a topic that will have some opportunity to explore further today. And we are deep in the work right now at the U.S. Department of Education of updating our National Educational Technology Plan. There we're exploring three central themes as we develop that plan. The digital access divide, the digital design divide, and the digital use divide. And we're exploring those with particular attention to how to support our individuals and our students with disabilities in that work. A third way that we're doing more to advance this work is through the technical assistance that we provide our field every day in connecting with our educators, with our district leaders, with our state leaders and policymakers. Based at CAST, our National Center on Accessible Educational Materials that's funded by our Department of Education provides specialized support and coaching and online resources to increase the availability and the use of accessible educational materials and technologies for learners with disabilities across the lifespan. And then finally we have an essential lever in evidence and in research and the work that we do there. That's in partnership with our wonderful colleagues at the Institute of Educational Sciences that are building the evidence base every day, disseminating that evidence base around how to improve educational practice and policy, and sharing that evidence in ways that connect with our educators and our parents, our policy makers, and the public at large. And within our National Center for Special Education Research, NIS, we're looking at supporting research to expand knowledge and understanding of the needs of our children with disabilities and to supporting services that are provided under and implemented by the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act. So we're proud and excited about all of that body of work underway at the federal level. We also recognize that meeting the moment here is not about a federal solution alone. It's not about that series of investments or that body of work. It is about being a partner with our field in bringing to life the solutions, the opportunities that technology can unlock for learners in the future, and enabling that technology to make change and to unleash opportunity in the lives of our Individuals with Disabilities. So I have a few asks for you as you embark upon the day. The first is for those of you designing and developing ed tech, please make sure that you find and center those that you can learn from in thinking about accessibility in the development of ed tech tools. Hire and listen to those Individuals in the work that you're doing. For our leaders and our investors in the room, recognize that this is a critical moment for ensuring that what's created and what is marketed is not just for some but usable for all. For our researchers, understand that ed tech cannot support learning if it's not made for everyone, right? We still have to center that universal design and how we think about researching and developing those questions around the use of educational technology in our classrooms, in the lives of our learners. As a policy community, let's keep learning from and listening to those on the ground as they consume and experience the effects of those policies in their lives and in their learning each day. And to our educators and to our learners, you are the experts here. Let's continue using your experiences to better create and design and develop new educational technologies with your success in mind. Our individuals with disabilities need to be involved in this work from the beginning all the way through the end. We all have a responsibility to do that. And then finally, let's all remember our why. We do this work because this work is about our students' lives, their learning, and their futures. So as educators and education leaders, we all have an honor. We all share a duty. We all share a privilege of supporting the success of our students each and every day. That's why we do our work and steward our mission at the U.S. Department of Education. That is why we are so proud to be here in partnership with the New America Foundation today and with all of you in moving forward to put accessibility front and center in ed tech and help to support the lives and learning of our individuals with disabilities. Thank you all so much, and I look forward to all of the wonderful discussions and the sprint that will take place later this afternoon. Thank you. Well, welcome, everyone. My name is On Mei Chung, and I am at New America. I'm very grateful to be here today with all of the panel and the guests in the room. And what we're going to first start doing is I'm going to have everyone introduce themselves, and we will do Q&A with them, and then we'll have time for the audience for Q&A too as well. So get ready with any questions you might have. We will have time at the end for that. So I will start with Cynthia. Thank you. Thanks for the invitation to be here. My name is Cynthia Curry. I use she, her, hers pronouns. I'm a middle-aged white woman. I am director of technical assistance at CAST, and part of my role is as project director of the National Center on Accessible Educational Materials for Learning, also known as just the AEM Center. We're a technical assistance center funded by the Office of Special Education Programs. Hi, it's great to be here. I'm Rylan Rogers. I'm a middle-aged white woman, and I use she, her, pronouns. I'm the disability policy advisor at Microsoft, which is the funnest job in the world. I get to use the voice of Microsoft to lean in on fundamental rights. It's great to be here. Good afternoon, everybody. Well, it's good morning. My name is Yamala Piano. I use she, her, pronouns. I am a young Afro-Ladena woman, and I am the CEO and co-founder of SignSpeak. We are a cool innovation trying to recognize sign language into voice and voice back into sign language via an avatar using artificial intelligence. Hey, good morning. I am Paul Schrader. I am with the American Printing House for the Blind. I use he, him, pronouns, white male, brown hair with a lot of gray, beardless white, which suggests that I've been at this for a while, and it's true as a disability advocate. I've earned all that because we're always told wait till next year. I don't have a lot of those left, and our students sure as heck don't have another year to wait for education access in the technology space. So looking forward to talking about how we can do that, APH addresses that challenge with textbooks, tools, and technologies designed for students who are blind or who have low vision. And we do that. Thank you to the federal government with its appropriation from Congress and support from the Department of Education, which we very much appreciate. Great. Well, thank you. And again, my name is Lon May. I'm here with New America. I am a middle-aged Asian woman who still has mostly black hair. But very excited to be here. So we're going to start with the first question for all of you, which is what does accessibility mean to you both personally and professionally? You want to start, Cynthia? Sure. I will certainly start. I think of accessibility as really about belonging and accessibility thinking about the environment and making sure that an individual is able to experience everything within that environment, including anything that needs to be interacted with and that there are no barriers in the way for that person to be successful. And we like to think of accessibility at UICAST and at the AEM Center, really being centered on individuals with disabilities that's very different from availability. We tend to use the term accessible a lot and very liberally. So we tend to really start to focus people back to accessibility as being part of individual access related to an individual's function. This is Rylan. And I love being here in this space for what it means to me because I think back to the fact that I was sort of born for this to matter. I was born in 1975, which many of you know is the year that the United States first had special education legislation and the right to a free and appropriate public education. That was transformative in my life because when I showed up in kindergarten, I was amongst the first generation of students with disabilities who had an IEP all the way through. And I think about that empowerment and what it's meant to me and what other aspects of accessibility have meant to my ability to contribute to our world and our community. And that transformation is what I always think about in terms of accessibility. And I also think about the work left to be done and who hasn't had those experiences and the privilege and how 48 years later, there's still a big gap. So that's horrifying to think about how old I am, but it's more horrifying to think about the work that's left to be done in terms of accessibility. And as I mentioned at Microsoft, we think about accessibility as a fundamental right. This is Yami. Personally, I think I was having this conversation with my co-founder, Nicholas, this morning. And I think the way that I view accessibility personally is that it's not just a meaning or something we write on a wall, but how do we transform that into action, right? So for me, it's the action of empowering individuals of all abilities to thrive in a society that needs a lot of redesign for them because it was not created with them in mind to start with. So I really want to use my privilege as an able-bodied individual to be able to sort of enforce that and use my voice to echo sort of what they need and what they tell me they need. In terms of my professional life, accessibility has a very significant meaning because I work in this space. So for me, it's very much surrounding how do we give language access to individuals throughout their entire life, whether that is I'm walking into Nike to, you know, I need an emergency conversation with my banker. And so how do we do that in a way that is accessible and appropriate? So that is what it means to me professionally. You know, when I think about accessibility, this is Paul Trader, it's kind of a true north compass direction in my view, which means it's a goal, it's a principle. It's important to have the kind of markers that my colleagues have just talked about in terms of accessibility. But I also know, having lived a few more years even than Rylan over here, that accessibility often is honored in the breach. And I remember when we were working on some legislation back in the turn of the 21st century to address textbook accessibility. Yeah, 2003 we're talking about how do we get books into the hands of blind kids in a timely fashion. That's, you know, what, 20 years ago. So it's not like we were talking about that at the dawn of time, we were talking about that 20 years ago. And one of the parents that we had told the story about getting a call from her school principal to say, hey, could you leave your, could you keep your daughter home next Monday? Why? Well, we're doing the state testing and we don't have that accessible for her. And that's, I live that story too, right, as a blind student growing up. So we can talk the great game and we will and it's important and it's essential. But the reality is that there are so many ways that accessibility comes apart, often right there at the level of the street level, the implementation, the classroom, the workplace, where the principal doesn't quite come through. And so we need to set all of the standards and guidance that we can in place, but we also need to recognize that a lot of it is still addressing those attitudes so that the school principal thinks maybe six months in advance. Hey, let's make sure we test, we know testing is coming up. It's not a surprise. We've got a blind student, let's figure out how we address that. And by the way, they could have called the American Printing House for the blind to address that testing accessibility challenge. This is on me. Thank you. So one question in terms of you all have alluded it to some extent. How has the field of ed tech changed and accessibility evolved since the time you've been doing this work? I'll jump in. This is, this is Cynthia. I have been working in this area since 2000. So I too have seniority over Ireland on age. Thanks for bringing that up. Wisdom. Wisdom. Right. I have more wisdom. So when I started in 2000, the first version of the web content accessibility guidelines had just been released. So we were thinking about websites, right? And it was a lot of focus on commercial websites, higher ed websites. Now we're 3.0 is on the horizon for the web content accessibility guidelines. And in the meantime, there's been an explosion, not only of more complexity of websites, but also the introduction of enormous numbers of non web based digital applications. So in addition to that, we have school districts that are adopting these technologies through multiple pathways, not just through formal procurement at the systems level, but we have teachers who have the freedom in many cases to choose applications that match the pedagogy and the curriculum and the goals that they're teaching. So at the system level and even closer to more close to students, we're finding that there's not enough attention, enough experience around what does accessibility mean, embedding that process in those considerations. In 2021 to 2022, there were over 1,400 ed tech applications that were being adopted by school districts used on a monthly basis, and that had tripled since the 2017-2018 school year. So we're just seeing a lot more complexity, a lot more volume of ed tech being used in classrooms. But on the other hand, we're also seeing a lot of interest. An event like this is really exciting to me. When I started in this field in 2000, we didn't have a lot of company. There weren't many of us doing this work, probably on one hand, could count the organizations and individuals that were working in this area, and now it doesn't surprise me when I come across a name and organization that I didn't know was working in this area. So there's a growing recognition, a growing awareness of the need, and I think that's relatively new in the past five to ten years, and that excites me. This is Rylan. I think I'll add a couple of things. In addition to my own lived experience, I had the privilege of raising two now young adults and off my payroll individuals with disabilities, and so I got to see their experience with what the options were in technology from kindergarten to college graduation. So my son was born in 1997, and my daughter was born in 2000, so you think of that window of time, and it was astonishing the difference. I remember being in a very enjoyable IEP meeting prior to kindergarten talking about we needed to have voice input for a computer and the concept that we needed a computer and we needed this very expensive software. And then I remember when my daughter was in high school, and she showed me her latest favorite app that was cost $0, and I thought I spent $3,000 on my own money because the school was taking too long, and now it's free. So I think that's an interesting transformation that while the tech has accelerated and things that we used to think about as assistive technology are now accessible by design, but the gap that exists and that not everything is designed in a way that meets the needs of students with disabilities and certainly not everything's designed in a way that connects with assistive technology. So while there's progress, there's this tension of gap. And then I also spend a lot of time recently thinking about what's coming next because there's a little thing called AI. And what excites me is how can it accelerate accessibility, but then there's again the challenge and the risk. So there's so many layers to how quickly we've gotten progress and how much disparity there is and what's being applied and experienced. This is Yami. I think that there has been a great improvements in accessibility, and I by no mean am an expert in this room. There's educators, there's policymakers in the room that know more than me in certain topics. I think where I see room to grow is definitely in expanding more on two definitions that we already use. For example, there are great initiatives around English learners, right, and how do we empower them? So why don't we include, how do we include sign language in the classrooms in a more accessible manner, considering that sign language is its own language, right? So looking at ways of including accessibility within the initiatives that we currently have and shaping those perspectives so that technology and education can meet in a very interesting way that can empower these students to have the language access that they need. And sort of paybacking to what was just said, I think that we're in a point in time where AI can transform the way that we do accessibility to pulse point. How do we make implementation in the classrooms a little easier? How do we make sure that the teachers get the support that they need to understand these technologies? So all these things I think are a catalyst. We're in a moment in time where we can catalyze a community to come together and view it from different perspectives so that students get what they need at their early stages so that they can thrive in our society and be members that are happy, because that's what we want. We, in the blindness world, and I think in the world of individuals with significant disabilities, technology has obviously made a huge difference in accessing material, accessing content, addressing issues related to disability. So just for fun, I did bring some toys. So I'm holding in my hand a small device. It's called the chameleon. It's made by the American Printing House for the Blind in Cooperation with a Partner. It has a 20-cell Braille display. The input keys are designed based on the Braille code, so it's six dots. Very simple, very small, but limited in a sense that it's one line. We are now in beta on something called the Monarch, which I'm now holding up. I did this at a testimony recently which my daughter watched and she helpfully said, Dad, you hold up like a blind man. I forgot to get advice on how I should actually hold a product. I should go to the home shopping network, I guess. But this device has 10 lines of Braille, 32 cells across, and I can't be fast enough to show it to you. I'll maybe hold it up later. Graphics on the same surface. So on this same surface that I've got those multi-lines of Braille, I can effortlessly, almost, switch to a tactile graphic. And I remember in my high school years, my econ teacher, who was very clever, was talking about supply-demand curves and came over with a roll of masking tape and sort of did a version of that on a folder for me, which in a way is a great version of accessibility, right? A clever teacher taking the step to do something that could have been provided if it had had this device available to me in real time in a much more expansive way. But I got the sense of what the curve was trying to indicate, and so in a sense the work was done. I used to play this fun game. My daughters are also young adults and also off the payroll, yay. So when they were going through school in Montgomery County, hereby and understand we've got some Moco people that were registered. So yay, Moco. Good school system. You've done them well. They were very successful. We used to play this fun game of, I wonder how I could use that Promethean board in your classroom if I were there as a blind student? What would they be doing? And as kids, we're quickly tired of dads pestering and annoying questions about how would we make the classroom accessible. But it was an interesting exercise and just sort of thinking through what would my education be like today. We still, it's relatively straightforward to address the platform accessibility. We know how to do that. CAST has done a lot of great work. The Web Accessibility Initiative. Lots of people have done great work in describing how to make software hardware accessible and usable. Microsoft has filled in a lot of those gaps. That part is relatively straightforward, although I would say to the Department of Education, one thing that would be helpful, I mean I loved all the initiatives, but how about a straightforward piece of legislation sent over to Congress that requires accessibility of all this material being put into the classroom. That part, so the platform is addressable, the hardware that it's delivered from relatively so, although still a lot of reliance on visual components. But again, we can deal with that. Where we run into trouble always has been true since the dawn of time is at the content creation standpoint. And addressing accessibility there, one of the studies that I saw recently was in just three or four years, really pre-COVID to post-COVID, teachers say they went from roughly 70% of their content being, education content being based on textbooks to about 30%. So the rest of it is filled in with open ed resources, other kinds of teacher created or provided, system provided, bits of content that are provided in lots of different ways. And my expectation is that most of that content, there's no one addressing the accessibility of it. Now there may be in places, and I'm sure there are in places, I'm sure there are very good people doing the work of making sure that we're looking at how to provide and prepare that information in a way that can be transmitted and provided accessibility to people with various disabilities. But there's nothing that requires that and there's nothing that makes that happen, absent, good effort. And so you've got content creation is a place for this can fall apart and frankly technology procurement is the other place for this easily falls apart because school systems have procurement systems that may, officials that may or may not know about accessibility, worry about accessibility, care about accessibility. And then finally at the end of that pipeline, things like this monarch that I'm holding in my hand which are extraordinarily expensive but are extraordinarily critical because in the end no one other than a specialized company is going to provide the kind of assistive technology that allows me to have braille under my fingertips in the same way that routinely we are providing information at the eye level for people who can see it. And so we need to have assistive technology in the ecosystem, in the decision making structure and in the procurement systems as well to make sure the students can have access where they need it to technology, to the content in a way that meets their specific needs. This is on me. Cynthia, we've heard a lot just amongst you all about the terminology accessible technology and assistive technology and what would you say help us understand how you define and differentiate the two? It's a really, really important question which I'm so glad that this is part of the panel. On the screen is a display of three different terms that all interrelate if we're going to make accessibility happen within an environment. And oftentimes these three terms are considered in isolation especially within consideration of the needs of individuals with disabilities but it's critical that they all be considered together and we heard everybody on the panel allude to this but this graphic kind of makes it clear. So there are three different parts that are displayed on the visual one is assistive technology and then there's material and then there's technology. So breaking out each of these individual parts is essential to making sure that accessibility is working within an environment and particularly with digital accessibility. So the assistive technology, that is really what supports an individual's functioning. So it's individualized for students who have sensory disabilities physical disabilities, mobility. So it's something that's matched specifically and if it's done right we're using something like Joi Zabala's set framework student environment tasks and tools and it's very much individualized for that individual to be successful and though that assistive technology can change depending on the environment, what the context is so it's not just one thing, it is designed specifically and matched to the individual's needs. Then you introduce that individual who uses assistive technology into an environment, say general education and it's going to be essential that that assistive technology is interoperable with what is selected for that general education environment and it's not just the materials, not just the technology but it's both. The AT needs to be able to be interoperable and work with both the material and the technology that's selected in general education. So the distinction there is that the material is the content or the information of the curriculum and that can be in any format, that's video, it could be text it could be audio, graphics and today as we've all been talking about the types and formats of the material it's highly variable. So we need to be thinking about is that material accessible is it designed from the beginning to be perceivable operable, understandable and robust and match the web content accessibility guidelines and accessibility standards. And then there's the technology and the technology is what delivers that material so that's everything from a learning management system to a digital book platform to the video player that's delivering the video material that too needs to work with an individual's assistive technology. So we often find particularly in IEP meetings that the team will consider the students need for AT and stop there and that is not going to produce accessibility for that student and it's not going to provide equal access or their opportunity to be independent to make progress in the general education curriculum. So it's really essential. This is what makes accessibility happen at CAST and the AEM Center. We really defer to the Office of Civil Rights definition of accessible and that is that an individual with a disability can access the same information interact with the same or engage with the same interactions enjoy the same services as an individual without a disability but there are three really essential conditions for that and that's equally integrated equally effective and substantially equivalent ease of use. So it's not just a matter to Paul's point about 2003 and getting textbooks to students it's not just many cases students were getting their textbooks in Braille or audio or other format it has happened to be six months late. So we're not that's making it available it's not accessible so equally equivalent really means at the same time it means at the same quality it doesn't have to be the same thing but it needs to be it needs to give the student the same opportunity as students without disabilities without additional burden on the student the family or the educators. This is Rylan can I jump in a little bit? Sure, absolutely. I love that you talked about sort of one of the challenges of not really thinking it through at the IEP level because I think this is a really important point for us to be thinking about right now and it's at that practice level but it's really also at the policy level because technology and educational experience has transformed where digital information is now a part of every, not every but the majority of students experiences and many technology has also many sort of mainstream technology has also transformed that there's accessibility built into it but we're seeing that that's not part of the conversation so when you think about if it's a one-to-one laptop setting then the decision might be made for a student with disability not to talk about assistive technology anymore and that's a mistake because we have to think about whether they need aftermarket assistive technology or whether they need to be sure that the things that are built in are turned on because too often schools and other settings are turning off the accessibility features for a variety of reasons so the conversation has to shift to think about the world of technology as it exists now and where it's going and how do we change our policies to reflect that to ensure that the real intent of assistive technology is now meeting the needs of students in this new digital age Rylan can I follow up on that in terms of the role of technology at Microsoft and its impact on accessibility what has been the journey at Microsoft because it sounds like it's an important part of what Microsoft is focused on now I love that you started with the word journey because any effort at accessibility has to be a journey and it's learning and frankly for Microsoft and others it's failing there have been times where our intention to ensure that we are delivering accessibility with our product hasn't met the needs of communities and we've heard from partners immediately and that's critical but at this point we really think about accessibility again a fundamental right and it's built into everything that the company does that includes making sure that disabled talents are part of the creators that are driving technology forward that gives us actually a superpower in designing a world that is more accessible it's also critical to think about how do you make sure that something is accessible by design and when we think about disability and accessibility we're thinking very broadly of all types of disability experience because many of us that are disabled it is not one part or one segment of our identity it intersects with other issues so really thinking that through holistically about what accessibility means and how do we deliver that and I think the other piece that's so important is that the awareness that while we've made great progress in things like live captions that are available on and offline in Windows 11 things like a great screen reader that's part of Edge that is not the right fit and meet everyone's needs and we still have to make sure that our technology connects with aftermarket assistive technology for the segment of people who are accessible by design is still not meaning that individual needs so it's an interesting balance and I think it really speaks to the need to evolve take that feedback to learn and grow which has to be the work of accessibility for all of us Paul to follow up on that given all the work you've done around policy how do you think companies like Microsoft could be helpful in furthering policy priorities well let me tell you no pressure you know a couple of things that I've learned on this journey one is that generally speaking the companies that are involved in providing technology that I've had a chance to work with want to do good work want to do accessible work want to address accessibility most of the companies have invested in strong systems people and content to do that and I really appreciate what Microsoft has done I appreciate some of the other companies that I know are represented here have done when we were doing the work to improve textbook accessibility we got the publishers got on board now they might have been pushed a little bit by the fact that some states were starting to do stuff and now you know Texas is starting to look at open education resources and I'm hoping that it's not addressing accessibility yet but I'm hoping at least I don't think it's clear in there yet but I'm hoping they get to it because that's kind of the path we went with textbooks but ultimately the publishers got on board and we used to joke that we would go into congressional meetings and the disability advocates really didn't have to say anything because our publisher colleagues were doing it just fine they were impassioned they were really talk and they were and it wasn't it wasn't smoke they really believed it and they really understood the importance of trying to make sure that people students could make use of the content they were publishing in these books so I think there's a lot of good work happening and what technology companies always used to tell us is set guidance but don't tell us how to do things and my response back on that was my kids tell me that too but if I don't tell them specifically how to do things frequently that guidance just gets ignored and so you know I do I think it's important and I think companies would acknowledge this right for the most in Rylan you just kind of pointed this out it is complex to address disability accessibility I think we kid ourselves if we think it's not it is complex because needs are complex because individual differences are complex I am one of the least able people in my company when it comes to technology and they will tell you that and I will agree with them but I rely on it every day and I love it and so there are so in you know at APH we address the needs of people who are blind low vision but who also have multiple other disabilities and honestly there are groups that I don't think we serve that well because it is extraordinarily challenging and so what I think is helpful is to have very clear call them guidelines call them standards but so that everyone knows what we're working toward so it's not just sort of this nebulous make something that's accessible to the widest possible number of users and various kinds of usability needs you've got to be more specific and I think you know we've got section 508 experience in this country which is a government procurement requirement for technology accessibility we've got the web accessibility initiative we've got our work on textbooks that dealt with making that content accessible and in some ways we've learned a lot of things in that process we've improved on some of those that we can address like web accessibility initiative where we can continue to iterate and we keep learning more and we keep trying to address more to help give more specific guidance and so I am a policy person I do think ultimately that requirements need to be in place because I think as good as everyone wants to be it falls apart at the level where an official is making a decision about what book what technologies are going to put into the classroom and that's where as I said before accessibility comes apart so we need the requirements to address that that was why we needed something in the textbook space because we needed requirements to make it clear to schools you have a duty to make sure that you are getting an accessible digital file of this book so that it can be transformed but we made mistakes and we're still living with those because it sounds like the individuals with disabilities education act may never be reauthorized it's been since 2004 and there's changes that need to happen in that law that's the downside of a legislative solution that it gets locked and I know that and I understand that is a downside but it is but it does we do set clear rules and just for fun by the way I used chat GPT and I said write me a piece of legislation for accessible education technology and I actually did a pretty fair job called upon the department of education to create guidelines so assistant secretary you've got your job ahead of you and it called upon to ensure compliance of digital educational instructional material including OERs provide developed used in the classroom and it talked about certain accessibility requirements that should be built in so you know the chat's getting there I'm speaking and may I add something I think is very important to think about this problem outside of big companies I think we need to empower innovation for people of all abilities to be able to innovate within their space as someone in the entrepreneurship like journey I think one of the biggest challenges that we face is that the the capital is concentrated in certain areas and we haven't diversified that enough to bring enough innovation into the forefront of accessibility getting capital to people of different abilities to be able to innovate within their communities and when we rely on private investors to do that they will tell you the blunt truth is this is a niche market we don't see returns so and so at Science Week we've been very lucky that we've been able to partner with social impact funds that see just besides the returns they see the immense amount of impact that it can do to the life of millions of individuals but sort of changing the dichotomy of let's depend on the big corporations to do something to let's empower everyone to think about creative ways of bringing innovations to everyone's lives because I think that at the end of the day a bottom up approach and a top down approach can meet at the middle of a very interesting work so speaking about where it fails what does it take for a state or school district to coordinate around all the issues and things that need to happen to make sure that all students have accessible we know that's not happening but what needs to happen so Cynthia so this is the work of accessible educational materials and I can say we have seen a lot of progress especially in the past three to five years so at the AEM Center we have a cohort of seven states for which we're providing intensive technical assistance so for each of those individuals seven states we work closely on progressing through what are called our AEM Center's quality indicators for providing accessible educational materials for each of those seven states are also working with three school districts some of them more and they're working together the partnerships are so important we've tried to work solely with school districts tried to work solely with state education agencies it really is so important for states and districts to work together so the state to point about top up top down bottom up the state is developing policies that are implementing them giving feedback to the state iterating before scaling statewide and we're seeing some success even procurement so the seven states those of you who are working or living in any of these states I can connect you with these people really the more cooperation coordination the better it's Georgia, Missouri, New Hampshire North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon and West Virginia all in Missouri one of their states one of their districts Francis Howell has gone through two procurement processes for digital curriculum one in science and one in math and have had tremendous success at communicating digital accessibility requirements as part of the procurement procedure putting in communication supports in negotiating with vendors and they have had great success across the district and these are so important to make that coordination work it's not just the special adder AT it's the procurement people administration and its coordination across content areas as well so we are starting to see some of the success of coordination state and district this is on me before we open it up to Q&A can you tell us more about how you started science speak and why and what is it that's a fantastic question so my co-founder Nicholas Kelly is in the room so he would be more than happy to talk to you guys about how we started but really science speak started with his frustration around accessibility as a deaf person it really started at the National Institute of the Deaf where we met our third co-founder who is not here today Nicholas Wolkins he is an ex-Google engineer knows American Sign Language and really was enamored with solving this problem and they sort of won Tiger Tank which is like this pitch competitions at RIT they somehow through a mutual friend found me I was living in D.C. at the time and I went to American University and then I worked at Fannie Mae once an eagle always an eagle that's right I went to a U2 and really he pulled me into this because for me it was a dull moment we have Siri enabling voice recognition we have so many great technologies enabled through voice and I am like why doesn't this not exist for sign language and a lot of people think of sign language recognition as enabling hearing and deaf to talk with each other that this can enable deaf and deaf communication right and being able to allow the deaf community to unite in a way that is extremely unique right and really really powerful because I think in Unite there is a strong force there so fast forward the sign speak is a sign language recognition technology that translates sign language into text and voice back into sign language via an avatar we actually have the technology today we are here we would love for people to try it during lunchtime and again going back to trial and error this is a journey and we are looking for feedback you guys are experts in things that we are not experts in and we would love to eventually be a resource to all of you so ideas are always welcome and ways to improving the technology is always welcome we just finished fundraising our precede round we have a strong feat to prove to investors what it takes we also got a national science foundation grant that is enabling to continue doing this work and part of this money is being used to pour back into the deaf and hard of hearing talent pool we just hire our first ML engineer who is also deaf and encouraging people to do a crowdsourcing data platform where we have gamified data collection for them and we incentivize them to monetary returns to give us some data it is a really exciting time for us at Sciencepeak come check out the technology we are always improving it and it has been an amazing journey and I am so glad that NICO allowed me to be part of this team because at the end of the day something that I am really proud of our company is that we have been able to bring in the deaf and hearing perspective to create something amazing and diversity and inclusion is the ability to bring people from different experiences to make something great and having grace with each other like NICO has educated me I have educated NICO and same thing with our team it has been a lot of learning a lot of failing a lot of crying, a lot of late nights but at the end of the day we are excited to get this to where it needs to get so that we can provide more accessibility to the world thank you we are going to open it up to questions from the audience and if you have a question there is a microphone roaming around so raise your hand if you have a question for anyone on the panel don't be shy Gabriel hello my name is Gabriel I am in third grade I use the C-Pen to help me read and a question is what types of technology for reading do you make I can jump in a little bit this is Paul with the American Printing House for the Blind I'm going to address a couple of different ways of getting at reading so one of those is Braille devices and I held up a couple of those I actually also brought a handheld magnification device we have a few of those in our collection of devices so for people with low vision this handheld device affords access to the content in the front of the classroom and to the content on the desk or to reading content pages however they wish there are also lots of wonderful digital tech devices that allow for reading of both digital text and various kinds of audio files for reading that sort of material as well and obviously lots of work that has been done to make that digital text usable for lots of people for whom print reading is not easily accessible way of getting access to print this is Rylan with Microsoft and the sort of answer is big in terms of lots of different choices a lot of people know about a set of tools we have called immersive reader it allows you to set the text and by text it can be something you wrote it can be something from the internet lots of different ways to get the text in different ways to make it more accessible for you it was designed for students with dyslexia I'm dyslexic so it lets you put a color overlay if you're a person for who that works it lets you break things down one word at a time or one syllable at a time one of my favorite parts about it is it lets me sort of click and ask a question if I'm stuck in terms of encoding a word and then the fun thing about immersive reader to me is that while it was designed for a very particular educational use it's now being used by lots of people as part of the way they enjoy reading by listening so it's now part of our browser anybody can turn it on I wanted to listen to an article from the Washington Post this morning while I was walking over here and I did it through my headphones with immersive reader so the idea of what technology does to change how we're all reading and consuming is fun to think about but I would say back to you what we really need to know is what else do you need and want because those next solutions are going to come from you and other students like you this isn't if I could just add one thing I love that you called out a tool that you're using the c-pen which is an essential tool as are a lot of optical character recognition apps and these are tools that help retrofit what's inaccessible to a student and I think it's really important to make the distinction there because thinking back to the graphic of assistive technology accessible material and accessible technology that c-pen or the OCR app that's assistive technology working in isolation because the material and the technology are not accessible so adding that additional tool for a student is not equally equivalent effectively integrated or substantially equivalent ease of use as soon as there's something additional that's put on a student to make it accessible for them and that is essential those tools are filling a critical gap it's not a criticism of the tools but just a really important distinction to make that we're talking about accessibility we're talking about everybody being provided the material that they need at the same time with equal effectiveness and equal integration I think we have time for a couple more questions you got to be better than that third grader though Hi, this is Ayan Khashor CEO of Benetech Gabriel, we make Bookshare which allows you to read a whole bunch of different books in the way that makes sense for you some of the ways that would be described here the question I have for the panel and thank you for this engaging conversation is whenever I go to schools and I see students using just different sorts of at-tech tools like games et cetera and very rich immersive experiences virtual reality all of that my question back to you all is that outside our bubble here which is obviously people who are concerned about accessibility in technology how are we reaching this explosion all these start-ups building tools so that we can make sure that those tools are available to everybody I'll take something that has been very efficient for me at Science Week is understanding where they're coming from and understanding that some people have the people that have some capital and the power might have never experienced accessibility and allowing them to ask really dumb questions that for us it's like wait no that's really evident and allowing them to ask those questions and then make that connection with them so that they can then go ahead and make those decisions the unfortunate thing is that a lot of the questions that I face is well how many people would this affect how much would it cost to implement really operational sort of conversations and you need to take them away from that and really bring it back to the story that emotion of here it is and that's why I love partnering with NICO because I think NICO allows that problem to become alive for a lot of people that don't experience it so really relying on that emotional conversation and then coming in with a very practical plan on how it can be done at least for me it's been shocking to me the amount of people that have opened up their minds and their pockets, thank you investors to make accessibility technology happen I'll just say two quick things three actually, one is I really compliment cast for the work that they're doing to raise the bar and raise attention I think the game industry is starting to look at accessibility in interesting ways and that will have benefits that's going to drive a lot of this forward the reality is that those questions they ask when you're talking with them they're real questions how much is it going to cost we're going to still struggle with that no matter what and I think there is still a little bit of that sense of when we talk about interesting and innovative action for students there's the work that we do in the disability sector and then there's the work that is happening in the non-disability sector and I don't think those two have come together well enough yet certainly organizations like APH can play a role and we're trying to bridge some of those gaps to have conversations to see how our technologies can play a role in the more interesting digital and virtual environments that are being created but I really have a lot of hope that the groundwork that we've laid across technology access work that's been done over the years the fact that companies have brought experts in at many different levels who work and live in these issues and in many cases have the disabilities we'll start to yield some really nice gains as people recognize that we can actually implement accessibility in lots of creative ways across that virtual environment and to add just one I think it's important to think about and I think about many movements when we're thinking about how do we create a movement around accessibility and I draw back a lot about the movement that I see within the Latinx community and the black community and something that is really important is just to get research out there of the power of this community recently there was a report showing how many people have reported disability after COVID and that has opened a lot of conversations around like oh my god this is actually a massive problem and how are we going to tackle it so I encourage people and institutions to really continue doing the work of publishing numbers behind it because I think that that drives a lot of it I mean the disability community is massive it has massive economic possibilities the amount of things that can be unlocked is great and I think focusing on that and really bringing in those numbers really helps drive the conversation forward sometimes. Well thank you we are overtime we're actually overtime and we actually have a whole audience that has joined us remotely too as well and I know they have questions but we will do our best to actually get some of those questions answered by you all afterwards but I want to just say thank you so much to this fantastic panel and we really appreciate all the amazing work that you are doing so thank you.