At the heart of an industrial revolution is an innovation that changes everything. Building AI Boston sees artificial intelligence as a renaissance. From the heart of innovation and the mecca of tech learning, we bring you AI for real people, a conversation for everyone. Our guest today is Sandy Lacey. She is the founding executive director of the Howe Innovation Center at the Perkins School for the Blind. In this role, she catalyzes and convenes key players from startups, academia, corporations, and government to drive innovation in accessible products and services for the disability community. She also leads three innovation business lines that accelerate accessibility for children and adults. Today, we dive into why Massachusetts is the place to focus on building with AI. Sandy, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's such an honor to have you here. Wow, your background is incredible. You and Cara share this amazing ecosystem. Hi, Cara. Hey, nice to see you both. You know, the funny thing is, Sandy, I met you in Las Vegas at CES. That's the wild part. It's like a small world, right? It is a small world. But it's interesting. When we go to CES, I do run into Boston innovation folks there, of course, right? It's one of the largest tech conferences. but it was very nice to meet you there Anna and thank you very nice thank you I will say this just because you know whoever's listening won't take offense but you absolutely crushed it with that panel you were my you were my favorite and yeah well it's part of the like you say it's part of what Boston brings to the world we like to say we bring the Boston state of mind through this conversation in this podcast but we're going to break that down not exclusively but both of you happen to be incredible women in AI and founders alike. And so, yeah, I can't wait for this conversation. Me too. Cara has that knowing look. Did you want to interject, my friend? No, I'm just so happy. Like, this is like, I would, the idea of talking about Perkins and AI and women in AI and Boston all in one conversation, I'm just, I can't get the smile off my face. I'm very excited. So let's talk about that. I know we're going to dive into how, but, you know, Perkins has this illustrious background. Can you walk us through a little bit? Not all 200 years of that, but it is a very prestigious place to work from. Sure. Yeah. So Perkins is in Watertown and we were founded almost 200 years ago. So we're coming up on our 200th anniversary in 2029. And our founding executive director was a gentleman named Samuel Gridley Howe. So it's H-O-W-E. And that's where the name for the Howe Innovation Center came from. He was really a radical thinker for that time. It was not commonplace to think that people with disabilities should be a part of mainstream society, you know, in the 1830s. But Samuel Howe absolutely believed so. And he dedicated his life to advancing that mission. He found the dollars, he found the teachers, he found the students, and he really, you know, brought the school from an idea into something that came into existence and that is still standing the test of time today. I think there's only like maybe five Fortune 500 companies that are as old as Perkins. So yeah, so you know, to last that long, you have to innovate, right? Because times change. And so innovation is really in the DNA of Perkins. We invented one of the leading ways that people learn Braille, something called the Perkins Brailler, which we can talk about in a little bit. We invented deafblindness education. So we were the original teachers of, you know, how to educate somebody with deafblindness. And we're just constantly coming up with new ways to do things to better help children with disabilities find their place in the world. We have about 200 kids on campus today. Many of them are residential. And then we serve around 1,400 children in the public schools across Massachusetts. So most kids who are blind or low vision are actually integrated into our public school system. So we have teachers who go out and make sure those children have what they need for their education. And then last year, we reached over 1.2 million children and their families globally. So we have a very large international presence where we're not building schools, but we're building capacities. So we're working with ministries of education, families, and schools to help individuals understand that every child has a right to learn and children with disabilities can learn. And so helping set up classrooms so that they are able to achieve their educational right. It's incredible context. And thank you for kind of painting that picture because it's important. And can you do a little, can I, can I find out a little bit more about, do you have a why? Is there a reason why you kind of shifted your focus? And I know you have a huge career background and just walk me through why this stuck out as where you live now. Yeah, thank you. It's true. A few years ago, I didn't know much about disability to be truly transparent. And I hope that this can actually serve as a call to come in for a lot of people in the Boston AI and the tech scene. You don't have to have a personal lived experience with disability to be an ally or to better understand accessibility and what that means for a large portion of our community. You know, I started my career in climate and clean energy, and I was always very, you know, mission-driven, I would say. And I ended up in financial services after a period of time. Somebody has to pay off $100,000 worth of student loans somehow, right? You know, I kind of came to the point where I was like in my early 30s, I was staring at my student loans in the face. And it's, how do you pay these off? And I had a really amazing opportunity actually to run a large innovation lab and an advanced technology practice at a financial services company. So I took that. But six years in, I really asked myself, what's missing? Something felt like it was missing. And so I really wanted to get back to a mission-driven organization. And Perkins was looking for somebody to set up an innovation center And I said I don know much about disability or blindness but I know a lot about how to build an innovation ecosystem Because I had spent a handful of years working under Governor Deval Patrick administration supporting the climate and clean energy ecosystem here in Massachusetts. So I met the CEO of Perkins at the time and, you know, told him about my background. And I was very transparent. I was like, you know, I don't have much experience in this specific sector. And he said, well, that's okay because we have 200 years worth of experience in this sector. And you seem like a voraciously curious person. So you'll get up to speed and it won't be a problem. And I've been at Perkins for over three years now. And it's been nothing but an honor. It's been a lot of fun. Yeah, go ahead. I was just gonna say, I mean, there's probably something magical that happens in the Boston ecosystem too, right? For this kind of connectivity of, you know, a school that's been around for so long and so well-respected. We certainly have lots of great schools around, but that sort of endless curiosity too feels like it's part of that Boston kind of vibe, right? And so the fact that this was built here seems pretty natural. So I have to imagine that whole ecosystem kind of feeds into that kind of innovation mindset. Yeah, you know, it was really interesting to me because I had been in the Boston tech scene for about 18 years when I joined Perkins and I had never really heard the word accessibility before. And that struck me because I'm a person who leans in and if there's any sort of like injustice, I'm usually the first one like standing at the front of the lines being like, this is not just. Right. Yeah. So I was just like, I was kind of taken aback that not in any venture in my product development or programmed management journey had anybody ever pointed out, you know, hey, is this accessible for people with disabilities? whether it was like a PDF that I was circulating or a conference I was putting on. I mean, we put on tons of events during my prior career at various different places. And it was never a topic. And I was really struck by that. And I know so many folks in Boston Tech who are social impact individuals, even if their venture isn't a social impact venture, they're philanthropic, they want to do the right thing, they want to build an inclusive community. And I thought, oh, okay, this is really interesting because there's a depth to disability technologies, like things actually being built for people with disabilities. And then there's this whole breadth approach, like the average product or service, how can we do this with a more human-centered design focus so that it's built excessively from the beginning? And that's what I'm thinking about, yeah. And you may not be able to answer, so this is a little unfair, But why do you think like so in some ways like, OK, well, maybe we would have think Boston maybe would have been a little bit better about making those connections, but even we weren't. So what do you think is the reason that, you know, we know that accessibility and accessibility in tech has been important for a long time? Why do you think it's still something we're having a hard time drawing the connections to? It's such a good question. I think that there, I think it probably straddles two different root causes. The first is like representation and how representation matters. So if there's somebody with a disability in the room or with the lived experience of being a parent of someone with a disability or whatnot, then that point of view is represented. But if everybody in the room doesn't have a lived experience, it doesn't necessarily get reflected. And this is not exclusive to disability. It's like, you know, before women were in the workforce, you know, products were being designed just for men. And that's why, you know, seatbelts weren't working for women in the beginning, right? It's different impacts for women. So it's very similar. similar. I think that part of it is a representation problem. So I think more people have disabilities or have a personal relationship to disability than they realize. And I kind of took a step back and I realized that mental health challenges and mental health diseases are considered a disability. Mobility, like, you know, I started better understanding the breadth of disability. And I realized that, oh, my grandmother wasn't just losing her hearing. My grandmother had a disability. Right. You know, and I started really thinking about disability differently, but it's an identity thing. And I think that folks to date, you know, maybe it's the way a lot of us were raised. Disability was quite other. And it's actually not. I mean, 25% of Americans have a disability. So it's most of us. And if we grow into old age, we're going to acquire a disability. So if it's not you now or someone you care about now, it's future you. We rely on disability tech already. For those on video can see what I'm talking about. I've got a pair of glasses on that have progressive lenses, right? And without those, I would be, before I got my LASIK, which is a whole separate story, because that's tech too, right? We happen to live in a city with a mass eye and ear, so we're very happy for that. But this is technology that's sitting on my face. Like, this did not exist at a point in the past. Right. And, you know, I think a lot of the disability community is a really creative, inventive community. And a lot of things that all of us use every day were rooted in, you know, the Genesis story is within the disability community. and now it's a ubiquitous technology that folks use. But I think just the one other thing that I want to point out is beyond representation and identity is the business impacts of accessibility. I do not think business, whether it's a startup or a large corporation, deeply understands the money that is being left on the table by not building products excessively. So I think people tend to think of accessibility as like a bolted on, on the after, like after something is done. And that's extraordinarily expensive. And it's usually done because of some sort of legal compliance. So they have to do it. But if accessibility is baked into a product from the beginning, it allows that company to tap into the $18 trillion worth of annual disposable income that people with disabilities and their allies have on an annual basis to spend. And if your product isn accessible you losing out on that possible customer So that something there a big business case to it that I think has not been in business in MBA programs It hasn been baked into the way people think about building products and services. And I'm really hoping that the How Innovation Center can be a mechanism to change that. And I hope we can get it right with AI from the beginning. Well, that's perfect. Let's throw a number on the table because this is what I've heard And maybe this is something that you pull from from Massachusetts looking to be a 40 billion dollar accessibility opportunity or a hub for this this kind of innovation. Is that currently what you're looking at or thinking about or? You know, the way I'm the way I'm thinking about it is, you know, so I'm a New Yorker by I wasn't born in New York, but I grew up in New York. I'm a New Yorker by birth, I always say a Bostonian by the grace of God. I've been here for over 20 years. And like, this is, you know, this is my home and I love Massachusetts. And we have perfected this recipe of creating an innovation ecosystem. Countries from all over the world come here to learn how to build a tech cluster. And I believe that it's great to have the best biotech cluster. It's great to have the best AI cluster. It's great to have the best climate and clean energy cluster. But if your cluster is not accessible, is it really the best? So I want to see all of our innovation clusters that we have here start to incorporate accessibility into the way that they work. This means captioning at every public event. And it's not just captioning for the accessibility themed track. You know, it's captioning for the fisheries track or for the femtech track, because captioning benefits everyone. And it's like little things like this, you know, application processes for our accelerator programs, like, are they accessible? Are they screen reader compatible? Are they, you know, because guess what, an accessible application will be better for everyone. And so I'm really hoping that, you know, I don't know of another innovation cluster that's angling to become the most accessible. And all revolutions start in Boston. So why not? Absolutely. Well, let's talk a little bit about examples. Like talk to me about the three businesses that you work on. I heard you talk about this at CES. And I think it's really cool just that to talk about the functionality of the furniture that you build. I mean, that was a cool application. Yeah. So we so I run three different organizations at Perkins. They all fall into like the product or ecosystem space. So first we make adaptive furniture for children with disabilities and it's not just furniture, it's also learning tools in our assistive device center. So this is located on our campus. It's, you know, it's pretty small. We just have a few people working there full time. And then we have an army of volunteers who come in and we make and manufacture this super low tech, adaptively designed furniture to allow children to unlock learning. So many children who are in our community have mobility disabilities that make it difficult to sit up or stabilize a body. And how do we expect a child to be able to learn if like 99.9% of their energy is going into trying to stabilize their body? So a parent or a teacher of a child with a disability that manifests in this way, you can't just go to Target or Walmart and buy something off the shelf. It doesn't work. You need special equipment and that special equipment shouldn't be expensive. And so that's why we make it out of cardboard, three-ply cardboard, because it's incredibly durable. We can customize it to the child. So we make, in partnership with an occupational therapist and a teacher of the visually impaired, we take measurements and we make a variety of different adaptive devices for our kids. We make around $2,000 a year, but I really have a goal to spread this know-how nationwide. So if anyone out there who's listening is interested in talking more about that, I would love to do so because I actually don't know how kids in other states are getting this need met. In fact, I think it's either like a neighbor piecemealing something together or something is being purchased at a store and then broken apart and customized. And I think that Massachusetts can lead in getting these very much so needed and like instant result adaptive products into the hands of kids. I love the assistive device center. I love the idea of like tech doesn't have to be electronic or super expensive or, you know, it can be, you know, innovation can be made out of cardboard. Like I think that's brilliant. Yeah. And you know, it's interesting because it's very manual right now, the way we do it. But I believe that a camera with AI could actually take a look at the child and take the measurements much faster than getting like a specialist teacher to that kid. Like imagine if a parent in Texas could just hold up the camera and accurate measurements could be taken. And then, you know, this, the, whoever, whatever teachers working with that kid fills in a form, and then we could meet that need. So there is a, there's even in the low tech cardboard, AI can actually operationalize and, and streamline the way we work to, to get this into the hands of more kids quickly. Well, let's talk about the Brailler, something invented in 1951. And, and why are you becoming this like global influence on, on how to even service this machine? Can you talk about why that's still even a tool that people use and how you're helping? Yeah. Okay. I actually have one on my desk. I look at it every day. This is a classic Perkins Brailler. And this is one of the leading ways that people who are blind and low vision can learn Braille. we invented it in 1951 it's mechanical so there's no electrical components to this it's a mechanical typewriter it is awesome I know Tom Hanks loves typewriters so if he hears this he needs to contact me and I will give him a brailler there you go Tom yeah let us know um this brailler it is like it's a tank right and it lasts so we have half a million of that like around 400,000 maybe 450 globally. We sell into 130 countries and it's a beautiful, beautiful machine. It stands the test of time It very very straightforward But in the year 2025 in the developing world it it doesn do what it could do right Technology and the ecosystem around the Brailler is totally different in 2025 than it was in 1951 So the Brailler and my team, we have a Braille innovation team. We are embarking on a very exciting journey to take our traditional Brailler, our Braille product, and figure out what role Perkins wants to play in making Braille literacy more obtainable. It's very hard to learn Braille. There's a huge shortage of people who are, of teachers of Braille. So people who, educators of children or adults who are blind are called teachers of the visually impaired, TVI, and not every TVI knows Braille. So your child might have a TVI, but they might not be a Braille teacher. And we're hoping that by upgrading our Braille literacy product line, we can close that gap in teacher availability and really help more people learn Braille. And AI can play a huge part in it because right now the Braille curriculum is very, very challenging. And if you can gamify and micro customize learning Braille using AI, it's a game changer. So, you know, if you have a six-year-old girl who's blind and she loves Peppa Pig and horses, like imagine all of her braille literacy curriculum being customized in the voice of Peppa Pig, you know, about horses and ponies. Now, she wants to do that. Or if you're an adult in your 40s and you have retinitis pigmentosa and you're losing your vision and you love the news. I don't know who loves the news now, but let's just pretend you're like a news junkie. Well, there you go. It could be like Tom Brokaw and headlines. timelines. There's a variety of different things that AI could really unlock in the customized learning. And if anybody who's listening is interested in helping out with that, we definitely need volunteers on that. Oh, well, let's, you know, we're going to wrap up shortly, but, you know, you touch on something important that you're looking for volunteers, you're looking for people to get involved. I will tell you that my journey into understanding accessibility comes from my mom who's hearing impaired. And it took us into, I guess I was 40, but for the first time I took an ASL class and sign language class. And my mom's reaction and the tutors that we got was so overwhelming. They're like, why would you never want to learn your mom's language? She didn't learn it. We both learned it together, but that accessibility hit us over the head. Like, why'd you wait so long? And so, I mean, I just want you to know that the links that you sent me The good news about glasses. And, you know, it's, I wish that everybody could understand you're part of this global family. You don't need like a disability story to affect you. But just the links that you sent me, Sandy, have been so impactful to understand the good news that's happening. I want everybody to understand that you can be part of that. You can be part of the good news going on today. I think that it takes a village. And I think that we're not just talking, you know, in platitudes here. It's like, how can people get involved? Because guaranteed, whether it's Cara, I know what happened when I lost my vision. I felt the same. It was like, wow, things can be taken away from me. This affects everybody at some moment in their life. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. How do we get involved? How do we tap the good stuff going on with you? Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate that. Listen, anybody can reach me. Innovation at Perkins.org goes directly to my inbox. So it sounds like it goes somewhere else, but innovation at Perkins.org does hit my inbox. So please do reach out. I mean, Perkins is always looking for companies who want to bring their employee workforce to volunteer. We have a ton of different volunteer opportunities. I'm in need of software engineers. So if there are any AI software engineers who are looking for an impact-driven volunteer opportunity, please reach out for me. I have a variety of actually really cool projects. You know, Perkins, we're a nonprofit. You know, we're not a tech powerhouse. But I'm hoping to help the tech powerhouses of Boston think about, you know, our community. I always say Perkins prepares our kids for the world. And my job at the How Innovation Center, we're going to prepare the world for our kids. I love that. So, yeah, please, please do reach out. Beautiful. Any final words from either one of you? I mean, I love visiting your great state. I can't wait to hear more. Please come back and give us more good news stories. For anybody that's been listening, we will drop some of those links. You should see what kinds of things are happening in disability tech, why we're all passionate about this and why you could be and should be too. But any final words, Sandy or Cara? I would just say it's never too late to try to learn about accessibility. And once you experience it, you can't unexperience it. And so it's a really, it's a really, it's a cool, it's a cool thing to explore, you know, human centered design. It can really shift the way you experience the world for the better. Mm-hmm. Agreed. Yeah. Cara's shaking her head too. We've enjoyed. Yeah. It was a great conversation. And, you know, we'll talk more when we continue this conversation about where the startup sort of entrepreneur, like AI ecosystem can, can meet, meet you halfway or more, you know, what can we do collectively to be, to have this more on our awareness and to be more, you know, proactive in this space together too. well said well thank you please come back sandy thanks well thank you for having me i would love to okay like and subscribe and check out our links they're so so cool it's really good news and this is why i fell for you in the beginning you you you got some great demonstrations and thanks for the visual aid oh my gosh you brought you get mad props for bringing in oh i love my brailler the brailler is cool okay tom hanks if you're listening check uh check out how you can get one. And for Founds of Building AI Boston, this is one more reason why we love where we get to do business. Thanks, ladies. Cool. Thanks. Thank you. Thank you for joining us on Building AI Boston. Stay tuned for more enlightening episodes that put you at the forefront of the conversations shaping our future.
