A11yNYC - Accessibility New York City

Important note
Everyone will be added to the waiting list. Online attendance is open to everyone. We need to monitor in-person attendees, so please answer the question when RSVPing. Thank you!

The Howe Innovation Center at the Perkins School for the Blind is thrilled to bring together NYC’s best and brightest in accessibility for an evening of knowledge sharing and community building. Together, people with disabilities and their allies control $13 trillion worth of disposable income, yet the market remains fragmented. The Howe Innovation Center has identified over 700 companies designing and building products specifically for people with disabilities.

At the Meetup, we will share our preliminary industry market map as well as our overall vision for how we can support the disability tech innovation ecosystem. We will also shine a light on two NYC startups that leverage advanced technologies like haptics and computer vision to move the needle on accessibility: Wear.Works and ARxVision.

Come learn about the new community initiative from the Perkins School for the Blind - the Howe Innovation Center. Director Sandy Lacey will share how the organization is working to catalyze and convene a multitude of players within the disability tech ecosystem: people with disabilities, entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, and more.

• Understand the market landscape of innovations for people with visual impairments, including an overview of 90+ companies operating in the space of navigation, tactile displays, keyboards, and more.
• Find out why we created the Howe Innovation Center and how you can get involved in growing our disability tech ecosystem!

We will have Keith Kirkland from Wear.Works and Ron Russo from 5Lion Ventures (investor in ARxVision) share the highs and lows of the entrepreneurial journeys within the disability tech space, show the cutting-edge technology products they have brought to market, and answer questions from the A11Y community.

And there will be time for your questions.

This event will be online and in-person.

Presenter bio
Sandy K. Lacey is an executive leader who’s all about building things that matter. As the Director of Innovation at the Perkins School for the Blind, Sandy is catalyzing and convening key players to drive innovation in accessible products and services for the blind, visually impaired, and multi-disability communities. She is also a lecturer at MIT Sloan’s School of Management, where she teaches Building an Entrepreneurial Venture.

As an executive dedicated to making a difference, Sandy has extensive innovation experience in corporate, government, and academic settings, and excels in startup environments. Sandy is a 3x early startup employee, working at Emerging Energy Research (acquired: IHS), CB Insights, and Drafted (acquired: Instawork).

Serving the Commonwealth of Massachusetts under Governor Deval Patrick, she wrote state policies, programs, and drove infrastructure investments to grow the state's emerging climatetech innovation cluster. As a corporate executive, Sandy built and led the engineering, design, and product management teams at the Innovation Lab for a Global 500 financial services company. In this role, she also spearheaded the company's advanced technology practice including blockchain and voice-activated devices.

She loves studying how technology and design can be leveraged to improve the human experience. Sandy has a Master’s from the Fletcher School at Tufts University and a B.A. cum laude from Georgetown University.

Accessibility
The presentation will have captions [CC].

Livestream
Provided by Internet Society Accessibility SIG.

Link: [coming soon]

Accreditation
All A11yNYC meetups are pre-approved for IAAP Continuing Accessibility Education Credits (CAEC).

Sponsors
Thanks to Asana, Evinced, Equal Entry, Fable, and Google for sponsoring.