Howe Innovation Center

Disability-tech founders work with the Howe Innovation Center to connect their products with disabled users for testing and feedback before launch -- shifting user research and QA testing upstream, while raising the question of who benefits from that connection.

ENABLE Model location

• Builder-side Interventions → Set Requirements that Include Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Design Accessible Experiences
• Builder-side Interventions → Test for Accessibility
• Builder-side Interventions → Iterate to Address Shortcomings
• Navigator-side Compensations → Submit Feedback to Creators

What it is

The Howe Innovation Center, launched in May 2023, is part of Perkins School for the Blind -- the oldest school for the blind in the United States, founded in 1829.¹ The center is named after Perkins' founding director Samuel Gridley Howe, a reformer who pioneered education for blind and deafblind students in the 1830s and whose work with Laura Bridgman -- the first deafblind person to receive a significant education in English -- would later inspire the Keller family to seek a teacher from Perkins for their daughter Helen.² Howe was also an early technologist: he collaborated with Stephen P. Ruggles to develop Boston Line Type, an embossed writing system designed to be read by touch. He was also a showman -- he raised funds by publicly exhibiting his blind students' capabilities to audiences who marveled at what disabled people could do.²

The Innovation Center connects entrepreneurs and technology companies with disabled people to co-design accessible solutions for employment, education, and daily living.³ Its founding Executive Director, Sandy Lacey, came to the role from corporate innovation and state policy, not from the disability sector. In an interview with Startup Dreamers, she was candid about this: "I might not know a lot about disability and accessibility, but I know a lot about ecosystem development and what that recipe is like."⁴

Perkins' access to children and adults with a range of disabilities positions the center to provide what most startups lack: direct contact with the people they claim to serve. As Lacey described the model: "We are looking at building a community of people with disabilities to meet that demand from the private sector for primary market research, user testing, and customer insights."⁴ Partnerships with MIT, Olin College of Engineering, and McKinsey & Company provide research capacity.³

The center maintains a database of 750+ assistive technology companies globally -- 40% U.S.-based, with the UK, Israel, India, and Australia rounding out the top five markets. In the U.S. low-vision navigation space alone, Howe catalogued 140+ companies, including 23 glasses-based startups that had collectively raised $135 million.⁵ At CES in January 2026, Perkins released a white paper, "Defining DisabilityTech, Volume II," reporting that early-stage disability tech investment grew from $818 million in 2022 to $1.1 billion in 2024, based on McKinsey research analysis.⁶

In January 2026, Howe partnered with Adaptation Ventures, a pre-seed angel investor group focused on disability and accessibility tech, to address the "first money in" funding gap for disability tech founders.⁷ Adaptation Ventures was founded by Brittany Palmer, a congenital bilateral below-elbow amputee and attorney, and Rich Palmer, a brain aneurysm rupture survivor and former managing director at Launchpad Venture Group.⁷ Brittany Palmer sits on the Howe Innovation Center's Advisory Board -- one of the few confirmed instances of disabled leadership in the center's governance.

Why it matters

The Howe Innovation Center addresses a structural gap in how disability technology gets built: most startups develop products about disabled people without meaningful input from disabled people until late in the process -- if at all. As Rebecca Rosenberg, founder of ReBokeh Vision Technologies, put it: "Many, many accessibility companies are not involving disabled users in their design process."⁸

Disability technology emerged primarily from medical and rehabilitation contexts, where the frame was clinical: identify the impairment, engineer a corrective device, deliver it to the patient. The disabled person was the subject of the design process, not a participant in it. The medical model positioned disability as a problem to be fixed, and the people experiencing it as the site of the problem rather than the authority on the solution. When the startup ecosystem absorbed disability tech as an investment category -- particularly after the ADA (1990) created legal infrastructure and post-COVID AT adoption accelerated interest -- it inherited the same structure. Speed-to-market incentives pushed user testing to late stages or eliminated it entirely. Disabled people became, as Rosenberg described, "validation points and testimonials to sell a product, instead of experts critical to proper development."⁸ By connecting founders with disabled users at the requirement-setting and design stages, Howe attempts to shift that pattern upstream. The center's pitch challenge, market mapping, and hackathon programs create structured touchpoints between builders and the disability community before products reach investors. That is builder-side care at the stage where it has the most leverage.

Lacey framed Perkins as "building a community of people with disabilities to meet that demand from the private sector."⁴ The demand originates in the private sector; disabled people fulfill it. Startups get validated products. Investors get deal flow. Perkins gains institutional relevance in the startup ecosystem. Whether disabled testers are compensated for their labor -- the market research, the user testing, the customer insights Lacey describes as meeting "private sector demand" -- is not addressed in any of Howe's public materials. The center is named for a man who exhibited blind students to raise money for the school.² Samuel Gridley Howe's 19th-century exhibitions served a purpose: they proved disabled people could learn. The structural question his name raises persists -- when disabled people are connected to companies seeking to validate products for investment, who is serving whom? The answer depends on whether disabled users have the power to reject a product's premise, not just refine its interface. Brittany Palmer, who is disabled, sits on the Advisory Board. The center is led by Lacey, who came from corporate innovation: "I might not know a lot about disability and accessibility, but I know a lot about ecosystem development and what that recipe is like".⁴ Whether disabled people hold decision-making authority within Howe -- not advisory or testing roles -- is unanswered by public materials.

The capital flowing into disability tech follows its own logic, and Howe's market data documents the distortions. Investment in early-stage disability tech grew from $818 million in 2022 to $1.1 billion in 2024, driven by aging demographics, post-COVID AT adoption growth, and AI integration.⁶ But Howe's own market map shows where that capital concentrates: 23 glasses-based navigation startups collectively raised $135 million, while 15 companies using alternative wearables -- harnesses, rings, wrist devices -- raised $14.3 million.⁵ Investors fund form factors that look futuristic to them. Keith Kirkland of Wear.Works named the failure mode directly: "Don't build a blind device. Build a device everybody can use but optimize for the blind experience."⁵ Capital flows toward products that signal innovation to non-disabled investors, not necessarily toward products that solve what disabled users actually need. Howe's market mapping function creates value by documenting this gap at scale. The unresolved question is whether the center's co-design programming can correct capital allocation, or whether it surfaces user needs that startups then present to the same investors already committed to the form factors that win funding. The center does not publish outcome data, so whether startups that engage with Howe produce more accessible or more adopted products remains a structural intention rather than a demonstrated outcome. The ENABLE Model asks: do the products that emerge from Howe programs actually reduce navigator-side burden, or does the pre-existing disability dongles problem persist?

The bodily cost of disability technology that fails its users is not abstract. A navigation tool that doesn't work leaves a person navigating without adequate support. A communication device that fails means isolation. The 2023 U.S. Surgeon General's advisory on loneliness documented that social isolation increases the risk of premature death by 29%.⁹ Disability technology sits at the intersection of function and social connection: when it works, it enables participation; when it fails, it withdraws it. The cumulative experience of encountering products designed without genuine input from people like you -- products that address a problem adjacent to the one you have, or solve it in a way you cannot use -- has psychological weight documented in disability studies as part of the structural violence of the medicalized design tradition. The center is at the frontier of attempting to build a different model: systematic market mapping, structured pipelines, and a community that startups can access rather than having to construct from scratch. Whether it shifts outcomes rather than intentions is what the ENABLE Model waits to observe.

Real-world examples

In the news

Perkins' New Howe Innovation Center Designed to Accelerate Accessibility (May 2023)
-- Perkins School for the Blind, Watertown News

• The center launched with the explicit goal of connecting innovators with disabled users during development. Lacey: "By amplifying the lived experience of people with disabilities and creating programs that support innovation, we eliminate friction points for entrepreneurs and accelerate product innovation." The framing centers entrepreneurial friction, not disabled people's needs -- the friction being eliminated is the startup's difficulty accessing disabled users, not the disabled user's difficulty accessing technology.

Disability tech startups kill the cynic in me (September 2023)
-- Anna Heim, TechCrunch

• At TechCrunch Disrupt in San Francisco, the Howe Innovation Center delivered what was reportedly the first disability-focused talk at the conference, drawing 130+ attendees and distributing stickers reading "Accessibility is a human right." The presence at Disrupt -- mainstream tech's flagship event -- represents an attempt to move disability tech from a niche category into the broader startup ecosystem.¹⁰

Mapping the Disability Tech Market with Perkins School for the Blind
-- Equal Entry

• Howe's market mapping of 750+ companies revealed the disability tech landscape's concentration and gaps: 23 glasses-based navigation startups raising $135 million collectively, while 15 companies using alternative wearables (harnesses, rings, wrist devices) raised just $14.3 million. The data suggests capital follows form factors that look futuristic, not necessarily those that work. Kirkland's advice to builders -- "Don't build a blind device" -- pushes against the tendency to design products that signal disability rather than dissolve barriers.⁵

Assistive technology has a 'sex appeal' problem (March 2024)
-- Rebecca Rosenberg and Danya Henninger, Technical.ly

• Rebecca Rosenberg, founder of ReBokeh Vision Technologies, argued that the assistive tech industry funds spectacle over substance: "Companies -- and startups in particular -- are focused on sexy, futuristic tech that isn't actually viable." She described disabled users being positioned as "validation points and testimonials to sell a product, instead of experts critical to proper development." This critique applies directly to the model Howe operates in: if startups arrive at Perkins with products already designed, disabled users become testers of predetermined solutions rather than shapers of the problem definition.⁸

• In October 2025, Howe hosted its DisabilityTech Pitch Challenge, sponsored by the Mitsubishi Electric America Foundation. Tatum Robotics won the $5,000 grand prize for the Tatum T1, a robotic hand that translates English text into tactile fingerspelling for DeafBlind users. Founder Samantha Johnson conceived the project after meeting a DeafBlind woman during an ASL class at Northeastern University; she was named to Forbes 30 Under 30 in Consumer Tech in 2024.¹¹ HapWare won second place ($2,500) for a wristband-and-glasses system that translates facial expressions into haptic vibrations for blind and DeafBlind users.⁶
• Olin College's Paul Ruvolo noted the partnership helps engineering students "design, build, and engineer a more inclusive world" -- integrating disability perspectives into engineering education rather than treating accessibility as an afterthought.³
• Rich Palmer, Adaptation Ventures co-founder, described the disability tech funding gap bluntly: "There's no first money in that's helping companies get from point A to point B and it's crazy."⁷

What care sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Care at the requirement-setting and testing stages involves building with disabled users, not for them:

• "Don't build a blind device. Build a device everybody can use but optimize for the blind experience." -- Keith Kirkland, Wear.Works⁵ *1
• "It's past due time that accessibility gets centered in broader tech." -- Sandy Lacey⁴
• "I hope people [in tech] start doing the right thing from the beginning." -- Sandy Lacey⁴
• "We test with blind and DeafBlind users during development, not after launch."
• "Disabled users shape the problem definition, not just the interface."

*1:

This is sound design advice, but OXO Good Grips shows what happens when the product's disability origin is hidden once taken to the marketplace: the person the product was optimized for cannot tell from the shelf that it was made for them.

What neglect sounds like (builder-side interventions)

Neglect involves building disability technology without disabled input -- or treating their input as validation rather than direction:

• "We'll do user testing once we have a working prototype." *1
• "We interviewed caregivers and clinicians -- they understand the needs." *2
• "The technology works; users will adapt to it."
• "Companies -- and startups in particular -- are focused on sexy, futuristic tech that isn't actually viable." -- Rebecca Rosenberg⁸
• "We don't have access to disabled users at this stage." *3
• "I gave feedback during beta testing. They shipped it anyway without changes."
• "They brought me in to test after the design was done. I wasn't a partner -- I was a checkbox."

*1: By then, the product's premise is fixed. Testing can refine the interface; it cannot challenge the idea.
*2: Proxies are not users. A caregiver's needs and a disabled person's needs are not the same.
*3: This is the gap Howe exists to fill -- but filling it is not the same as closing it.

What compensation sounds like (navigator-side compensations)

Compensation describes what happens when disability tech is built without user input -- users must work around design failures or give feedback that may be ignored:

• "I was excited about this app until I tried to use it with my screen reader. Nobody tested it."
• "The device solves a problem I don't have while ignoring the one I do." -- the experience of a disability dongle
• "Another product designed by people who've never met anyone like me."
• "People with disabilities have needs that are not being met -- and they're not being met right now." -- Rebecca Rosenberg⁸

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All observations occur within the context of disability technology development and venture funding in the United States, where the Howe Innovation Center represents both a genuine attempt to connect disabled users with builders and an unresolved question about whether that connection constitutes co-design or extraction.

Footnotes

1. Social Welfare History Project: Perkins School for the Blind ↩

2. National Park Service: Samuel Gridley Howe ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Watertown News: Perkins' New Howe Innovation Center Designed to Accelerate Accessibility ↩ ↩² ↩³

4. Startup Dreamers: Sandy Lacey Talks Howe Innovation Center ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

5. Equal Entry: Mapping the Disability Tech Market with Perkins School for the Blind ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

6. PR Newswire: Perkins and Adaptation Ventures Advance a New Path for DisabilityTech Investment ↩ ↩² ↩³

7. TechCrunch: Adaptation Ventures is a new angel investor group focused on disability and accessibility tech ↩ ↩² ↩³

8. Technical.ly: Assistive technology has a 'sex appeal' problem ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵

9. Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory ↩

10. TechCrunch: Disability tech startups kill the cynic in me ↩

11. TechCrunch: Tatum is building a robot arm to help people with deafblindness communicate ↩