GOAT recently joined colleagues from University of Washington’s CREATE lab and University of Michigan at the CSUN Assistive Tech conference in San Diego. We shared booth space to talk with people in the exhibitor hall about open source assistive tech, the A11yhood database, and all of GOAT’s programs.
We really enjoyed the panels and resulting conversations relating to open source and open culture. Gregg Vanderheiden on his organization’s new tool for looking up open source assistive tech tools, Learn and Try. This is for the kinds of assistive tech that help you access computers, tablets, and phones, to make “technology” of that sort more inclusive. If you need tech to read, study, take notes, get on the internet, this is a great site where you can find useful help. It has a very elegant, thoughtfully designed user interface, and is aimed at a level where you can be a parent of a disabled kid, or a teacher, without any background in accessible technology, and learn about it. Rather than searching something like “assisted communication” or “dyslexia” you can click on the bit that says I need help with (Speaking) or (Reading) and get a list of software tools with links out to download and try them, or enable them in settings if they’re already on your devices.
Jennifer Mankoff and Josh Miele, collaborators of GOAT, held a session on the Open Source Accessibility Summit. It was amazing in 2025 and will be happening again in 2026! https://2025.allthingsopen.org/open-source-accessibility-summit . I hope we can make it this year!
We came to CSUN equipped to do some inspection and minor maintenance for mobility gear, but in practice, we mostly just talked with people and gave out our free repair kits. The conference itself had a much heavier focus on tech for blind and visually impaired people than it did on mobility tech. (Repairing braillers might be in our future, as the demand is high!) In practice, what this meant for me at the conference was that I spent a fair amount of time zooming around to chase down and accost random strangers who were using wheelchairs, and offered them our free toolkits. They seemed to appreciate the very targeted and useful swag!
Our road trip was really fun, and we spent time having dinners and lunches with our collaborators from CREATE and other orgs, talking about our joint projects and where to take them!
