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Author: Liz Henry

Community DIFxTech talk on Software design for assistive tech

Published October 8, 2025 by Liz Henry

This isn’t part of GOAT, but it’s a close enough intersection that I’d like to use this blog to invite any readers to attend. In my work with Borealis Philanthropy as program manager for the DIFxTech fund, I’ve been hosting a series of talks with our grantees, advisors, and other experts and advocates, for ways we mash up disability justice with technological innovation. If you’d like to be added to the invite, please email me at difxtech@borealisphilanthropy.org.

Next up in our DIFxTech Community Conversation series:

Software design, AI, Privacy, and Disability
Maitreya Shah and Ariana Aboulafia
Host: Liz Henry
Tuesday, Oct 28, 2025 11:00am PDT – 12:30pm PDT

headshot of ariana in a nice suit, looking lawyerly

maitreya standing in front of a neutral background, holding a white cane

Maitreya Shah and Ariana Aboulafia, from the Center for Democracy in Technology & American Association of People with Disabilities, will talk about their organizations’ recent work on assistive technology and privacy by design. This guidebook, Inclusive Innovation: How to Incorporate Privacy into Inclusive Design for Assistive Technologies, was published in July this year for the 35th anniversary of the ADA, aims to provide startups with easy, actionable steps to incorporate privacy into their design process.

Maitreya Shah is a lawyer and researcher, a current DIFxTech grant recipient for a joint project with the Bazelon Center, with extensive experience working at the intersection of technology regulation and disability justice. He is Technology Policy Director at American Association of People with Disabilities; previously, he was a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Ariana Aboulafia is the Disability Rights in Technology Policy Lead at the Center for Democracy in Technology. An attorney with a strong background in disability rights, law, and public interest advocacy, Ariana previously served as an officer to the Journalism Department at the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, as well as an assistant public defender in Miami-Dade County.

This talk will be recorded and shared, along with the chat and transcript. Previous DIFxTech Community Conversations are available at:
https://drive.google.com/drive/u/0/folders/1h_Zns7pdZfCGJyq6EygxbyOCrcvFc0uY

Access: ASL interpreters and Certified Deaf Interpreters will be on the call; there will be a text chat; and the session will be recorded with a transcript. If you have particular accommodations you would like to request, or any questions about accessibility, please contact difxtech@borealisphilanthropy.org.

screenshot of a zoom call gallery from a previous difxtech talk, with a dozen or so of the many attendees showing

More about DIFxTech:
* https://www.fordfoundation.org/news-and-stories/news-and-press/news/borealis-philanthropy-and-ford-foundation-launch-1-million-disability-x-tech-fund-to-advance-leadership-of-people-with-disabilities-in-tech-innovation/
* https://borealisphilanthropy.org/2024/12/09/the-disability-inclusion-fund-moves-over-4-75-million-to-disabled-led-organizations/

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Fundraiser for GOAT!

Published October 7, 2025 by Liz Henry

We are raising money to support GOAT’s program activities for the rest of 2025 and early 2026!

Your donations will support:

  • archiving, preservation work, more scanning of complete books, and adding better metadata to our catalogue of DIY assistive tech
  • wheelchair maintenance and repair zines free for our community, and nationally – distributed in partnership with Disability Culture Labs
  • wheelchair, walker, scooter, and powerchair maintenance and repair tool kits, free for people who need them in the San Francisco Bay Area
  • our Bay Area hackathons, reverse engineering, and modification workshops for assistive tech
  • collaborations with University of Washington and Berkeley assistive tech design labs, hack sessions, and student projects

And we have a  generous donor willing to match up to 20K!

You can read more about how to donate to GOAT  , or email liz@openassistivetech.org if you have other ideas about how to support our activities!

GOAT Business!

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C.R.I.P.S.R.I.S.E. collab: 3D printing for Permobil chairs

Published October 2, 2025 by Liz Henry

As part of GOAT’s collaboration with C.R.I.P.S.R.I.S.E., I’d like to quickly show off their newest 3D printable design, a hook designed to work with the Permobil’s Unitrack mounting system. You can take a look (or print one yourself!) on Thingiverse:

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7150714

3d model of a bag hook mount for a powerchair

One of GOAT’s workshop participants asked for this for his chair, and would like to test different styles of hook. There are some printable designs already out there, for example, on yeggi.com: https://www.yeggi.com/q/permobil%20unitrack/

After taking a look at this and other designs, @CriptasticHacker ended up using this model as a base, improving on it, and publishing it with an explanation of his changes.

I was curious to see this printed with a strong nylon or carbon filament, but was persuaded that we should first try this PetG model before amping things up to print in tougher filament that will take many more hours of run time to complete.

We’re looking forward to installing it and giving it a good test!

 

 

 

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AAC projects and policy

Published August 28, 2025 by Liz Henry

If you are interested in open source software projects for assistive tech, take a look at CBoard. It is a free/open source app for AAC (Assisted and Augemented Communication). It’s for anyone with speech and language impairments, facilitating communication with pictures and text-to-speech. You can use it to quickly construct useful communication boards, and it’s beautifully customizable. Currently, it supports 46 languages. There is a paid/subscription level to this app which makes it even more useful (and which supports the ongoing maintenance and development of the project).

a hand holding a phone or small tablet with nine colorful symbols and words used for communication

If you want to learn more about the current, complicated political, technical, and social landscape of AAC, here is a list of useful updates from Bob Williams, of the organization CommunicationFIRST:

Best Practices for Online Meetings with AAC Users

Technology for Equitable Communication: AAC Users Weigh In

New Film, 13 AAC Users: Priorities for Future Research

The FCC Needs to Address Digital Discrimination Against People Who Need AAC | CommunicationFIRST

CommunicationFIRST Petitions FCC to Add Text and Video Options for Suicide Lifeline | CommunicationFIRST

The FCC Needs to Address Digital Discrimination Against People Who Need AAC | CommunicationFIRST

2023-10-03 C1st Comments to DOJ on Title II Web Access Proposed Rule

Unjustly isolated, silenced, and deprived of literacy and freedom of expression … | CommunicationFIRST

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Open Source Accessibility Summit in October!

Published August 26, 2025 by Liz Henry

Coming up in October 2025, the Open Source Accessibility Summit! This is a one-day conference in North Carolina, for open source software contributors who are interested in building accessible tools and it is part of the (huge) All Things Open conference!

Do you have a passion for innovation? Do you believe everyone should be able to realize the benefits of technology? Please join us! Everyone is welcome to attend the summit. We need a diverse set of skills, experience, and perspectives.

Goals of the summit are to:

  • Make connections between people who have a shared interest in improving the accessibility of open source software.

    Share knowledge and current best practices for creating diverse, inclusive, and accessible open source projects.

    Define a public roadmap for improving the accessibility of open source software so the community can collaborate to realize it after the summit.

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    Building simple switches

    Published August 7, 2025 by Liz Henry

    In the material we are scanning from Alexandra Enders’ collection of DIY assistive tech information, we have come across several great sources for learning the basics of electronics in order to make switches, buzzers, and other small gadgets, very useful for people with limited dexterity to control other devices.

    I really like these short, practical guides. Rather than having to wade through a college textbook level guide to electronics, you get just the basics you need to build very cheap and easy gadgets.

    Today’s scan is simply called “Introduction to Electric Circuits”, written in 1981 by Hugh O’Neill from the Rehabilitation Engineering Center at Stanford.

    He explains what a circuit is – an unbroken path from one terminal to another of a power source, through which current can flow. A good overview of circuits in series and parallel comes next, including the tip that most simple toy adapters the AT maker will build, will be in series.

    Types of switches covered are toggle, rocker, push button, microswitch, rotary, and mercury (tilt) switches.

    It’s a very condensed electronics course in about 15 pages! If you walk through it and try the instructions, you will learn enough about how batteries, switches, circuits, and so on work that you can build many adaptive devices.

    Have a look: https://archive.org/details/introduction-electric-circuits

    a diagram showing a complete and a broken circuit

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