Snap Partner Summit: Accessibility, D.E.I., and Drones

Gary Bartos
2 min readApr 29, 2022

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A user wearing Spectacles augmented reality smart glasses from Snap points at a home appliance with a Start 30 Secs button. The text “start 30 secs” appears next to an audio output icon indicating that the text is read out loud.
Apologies to Sophia for cropping her out.

My company’s touch screen accessibility project for Snap’s A.R. smart glasses made an appearance in the video from today’s Snap Partner Summit (Thursday 28 April 2022). Such an honor!

Here’s the time-coded link to the bit about Echobatix:

https://youtu.be/OlPey4WxY1Q?t=2395

Accessibility & ASL

There’s also a great segment about Snap’s work in American Sign Language (ASL). They’ve started with fingerspelling, a feature you can incorporate in a Lens (a Snapchat app).

https://youtu.be/OlPey4WxY1Q?t=1703

Lenses are created with Lens Studio, a free development environment. Here’s the link:
https://ar.snap.com/lens-studio

Accessibility Tech

Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, has said that accessibility is a human right. I agree wholeheartedly.

Here is a link to a YouTube video in which Cook discusses accessibility with Deaf advocate and social media influencer Rikki Poynter:

The video was made on Global Accessibility Awareness Day 2017. This year’s GAAD falls on Thursday 19 May 2022. It’s the third Thursday in May every year.
https://accessibility.day/

Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI)

In my experience using Snap tech, attending their events, and communicating with their employees, Snap is serious about diversity, equity, and inclusion. For a sample of the Snap’s 2021 DEI Summit, here’s a chat between actor Idris Elba and Snap’s VP of DE&I, Oona King:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b69OgKZVdrM

Drones

If you haven’t heard of Pixy yet, check out this closing segment of the SPS video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OlPey4WxY1Q

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Gary Bartos
Gary Bartos

Written by Gary Bartos

Founder of Echobatix, engineer, inventor of assistive technology for people with disabilities. Keen on accessible gaming. echobatix@gmail.com