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Alex Westner:
Hi. This is Alex Westner.
Marilyn Morgan Westner:
I’m Marilyn Morgan Westner, and we’re the co-founders of Xander.
Alex Westner:
This is your Assistive Technology Update.
Josh Anderson:
Hello and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host, Josh Anderson, with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana.
Welcome to episode 671 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on April 5th, 2024. On today’s show, we are super excited to welcome back Alex Westner, along with Marilyn Morgan Westner, and they’re here to tell us all about XanderGlasses and how they can help individuals with hearing loss with communication and other needs. As always, we thank you so much for listening, and let’s go ahead and get on with the show.
Folks, if you’re listening to this show, it’s obvious that you like assistive technology and you love podcasts. Well, if you like assistive technology and podcasts, have I got a treat for you. Assistive Technology Update is not our only podcast here at the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads. No. We actually have two others. Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions, or ATFAQ, is a question-and-answer show where we take your questions, as well as questions that we receive through our other programs, and do our best to answer those with our panel of experts. I use that word very loosely, but, usually, it’s myself, Brian Norton and other members of our teams sitting in to try to answer your questions. The show relies on our listeners not just for our questions, but sometimes for the answers. Let’s not lie. We do not know everything that there is to know, so we always try to throw those questions out and sometimes our listeners’ feedback. Well, we get to learn stuff as well, which is always a great thing.
Or if perhaps you’re short on time, we also have Accessibility Minute. Now, Accessibility Minute is just a little taster. It’s going to give you just a little bit of information about a new piece of assistive technology, a new app, program or something else cool that might be able to help individuals with disabilities. They give you some resources where you can go and check out more about it on your own, so, remember, if you like this show, if you like assistive technology and you like podcasts, check out our other shows, Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions and Accessibility Minute to go along with Assistive Technology Update, which you’re listening to right now. You can find those over at eastersealstech.com or anywhere you get your podcast. Don’t forget to like, subscribe and give us some comments and feedback. We always love hearing from you. Thank you so much for listening to this and all of our programs.
Listeners, all of us here at the INDATA Project are really looking forward to April because, on April 17th, 2024, the US Congress and the disability community will celebrate National Assistive Technology, or AT, Awareness Day. The day honors people with disabilities who require AT to access their education, workplace, community and recreational activities. The day also recognizes the innovation of researchers, educators and the dedication of AT specialists and program providers who operate AT programs so that millions of individuals can acquire and use low-cost and, often, no-cost AT. If you’re looking to learn more about AT Awareness Day, you can check that out at ataporg.org/nationalatawarenessday. Of course, we will put a link to that down in the show notes so that folks can find out more.
We do have to send a shoutout to Senators Bob Casey, Kevin Cramer and John Fetterman for introducing the AT Awareness Day Resolution. We appreciate your leadership and support of people with disabilities to access AT in all parts of daily life. As listeners of this show will know, access to assistive technology is essential for millions of people with disabilities so they can live independently in their home or community, learn in school or take public transportation, enjoy the outdoors and so many more things. National Assistive Technology Awareness Day is here to shed light on the ways that AT provides people with disabilities’ way to access all the different joys in life and all the things that they want to to live, to work, to play and to do whatever it is that they want to do filling their day. Please do join us here at AT Update and at the INDATA Project in celebrating AT Awareness Day on Wednesday, April 17th.
To all our listeners who are AT providers, creators, really work anywhere in the world of assistive technology, we say thank you for all that you do. For all of our listeners who are users of assistive technology, we say thank you for reaching out and for assisting us with becoming better service providers and really just for everything that you do. Hopefully, you celebrate assistive technology on more than one day a year, but definitely take a little bit of time on Wednesday, April 17th, to celebrate AT Awareness Day. I know that we will definitely be celebrating it here.
Listeners, we here at the INDATA Project are pleased to host a web accessibility webinar for programmers and developers on Wednesday, May 29th, 2024. Attend and join renowned web accessibility professional Dennis Lembree for a full day of training. The training starts with a background on disability, guidelines and the law. Many techniques for designing and developing an accessible website are then explained. Basic through advanced levels are covered. The main topics include content structure, images, forms, tables, CSS, and ARIA. Techniques on writing for accessibility and testing for accessibility are also covered.
If you’re involved in web design or development, don’t miss this wealth of practical knowledge. Our speaker, Dennis Lembree, is a senior accessibility consultant at Deque Systems. He was previously director of accessibility at Diamond Web Services and worked several years on the PayPal and eBay accessibility teams. He also has experience at several start-up companies and contracted at large corporations, including Google, Ford, and Disney. Mr. Lembree published articles, led webinars and presented on digital accessibility at many conferences, including HTML5 DevCon, CSS DevCon, CSUN, AccessU, Accessing Higher Ground, Accessibility Toronto, and Paris Web. Dennis runs a blog, Facebook and Mastodon account on web accessibility called Web Axe. He created an accessible, two-time national award-winning Twitter app, Easy Chirp, which is now sunset.
Remember, if you’re involved in web design or development or want to learn more about web accessibility, please join us for our web accessibility webinar for programmers and developers on Wednesday, May 29th, 2024. We’ll put a link down in the show notes that will get you over to more information as well as our registration page. There is no charge to attend this webinar, but you do need to register. If you’re interested, please check out the link in our show notes.
Listeners, about a year ago, we were lucky enough to have Alex Westner join us on the show to talk about XanderGlasses. I was able to reconnect with Alex and his co-founder, Marilyn, at ATIA a couple of months ago, and they were kind enough to come back on the show and tell us all about Xander and the progress that they’ve made since we last had them on the show.
Marilyn, Alex, welcome to the show.
Alex Westner:
Thank you, Josh. It was so great to bump into you again at the conference.
Marilyn Morgan Westner:
We’re so excited to be here today.
Josh Anderson:
Yeah, I am excited to get to talk about it. I know I’ve talked about Xander for a while for some folks that I’ve worked with and everything, and it was nice to finally get to actually meet you in person, get to try them out. I’m really, really excited to have you back on the show to just make sure our listeners know all about it, about the updates and everything else. Before we get into talking about the technology, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourselves?
Alex Westner:
Well, great, yes. Marilyn and I are actually married. We’ve been together for a long time. We started this company together to really do something more impactful with the exciting technology developments that were coming out. Personally, I’ve spent 20 years in my career in audio technology and music technology. I started looking at AR and was not really excited about the applications of AR. When I was reading Stephen Hawking’s last book, he was, in his epilogue, thanking companies like Intel for all the great technology that they gave him so that he could write books and communicate and study and research, and he encouraged entrepreneurs and inventors to think about people with disabilities when they’re looking out at the world. That was when the light bulb hit of, “Oh, well, AR for disabilities is super interesting.” Our ideas for using AR glasses to help people with hearing loss was just a interesting idea, and the more we went out and tested it with people, the more the whole thing just really snowballed into where we are today.
Marilyn Morgan Westner:
I’m Marilyn Morgan Westner, and I was so excited to join Alex on this project. I don’t have a background in audio at all. I have a PhD in history, and I had worked at the Harvard Business School for almost six years working on teaching people about the founder’s journey, when you found a company, what to expect, and I got really interested in this idea of sensory substitution and using sight for sound because, on a personal note, I was really close to my great uncle, and he suffered from hearing loss. He lost his hearing progressively as he aged, and I just saw him shrivel. He was a very social, outgoing, wonderful person. He was a proud veteran and, as time went on, he just completely withdrew and stopped talking to people, and it broke my heart. When Alex had this idea, really, it just immediately caught my attention and I wanted to be a part of it. Luckily, because we’re married, we can spend all of our time talking about ideas and how this can impact people and, yeah, we just feed off of each other in that way.
Josh Anderson:
Nice. I know it doesn’t always work out that way, so we’re very, very glad, very, very glad that it did. Well, I guess on to to talking about the technology, tell us what is Xander and XanderGlasses?
Alex Westner:
Well, our product is a smart captioning glasses that are really designed to help people with hearing loss or other issues, auditory processing disorder, dyslexia, aphasia. There’s many types of conditions that people have where it’s really difficult to just understand basic conversations. Our smart glasses, you put them on, they have built-in microphones that are capturing the audio around you. They convert that audio into text and it renders the captions in your display in your glasses, but it’s not what you think. People think, oh, it’s right up in my face like reading, but it’s not. The optics of the glasses project the captions way out in front of you, maybe three feet in front of you, maybe at the distance where the other person you’re talking to is. It’s a really comfortable user experience where you’re looking at the person, you see their facial expressions, you can read their lips if that helps, you can see their hand gestures and, superimposed on that, kind of floating in space, you see captions of what they’re saying in real time.
Josh Anderson:
Yeah, and I can attest to that by getting to try them out because I know even I thought it’s going to be a little, overlay is the wrong word, but in-the-way-almost thing. No. It’s almost like there’s a box just floating next to the person that you’re talking to, so not quite like a word bubble, but like a word bubble over there next to them. You can still pretty much make eye contact, keep the conversation going, but you do have that text all right there. Then the text itself, could I change the size, the color, anything like that if I have maybe a visual impairment as well or maybe just can see or comprehend different colors or different sizes a little easier?
Marilyn Morgan Westner:
Well, you can change the text size and you can change the position. When you tested the glasses, Josh, there was a box around the captions. Right now, if you don’t like that background box, you can uncheck that as well and you can just actually see the words. That’s pretty nice and easy. You can do those things through either a voice command or a phone app that we’re in the process of. It’s almost ready. The one thing that you can’t do is, you asked about color, we cannot give people the option to change the color.
Josh Anderson:
Okay, but you can at least get the size. I like that I can get that box off there. That even gives me a little bit cooler of an experience if that’s what I like. You’d mentioned an app, and we can maybe get into that on things coming down the pipeline if we want, but I know, a lot of times, if I’m using any kind of caption or anything, I always have to be tethered to an app. Do the XanderGlasses need to be tethered to an app in order to get the captioning?
Alex Westner:
That’s a great question. The short answer is no. The way we learned was the hard way. One of our early prototypes depended on using a cloud service for captions, and we were in some demos. We were actually in a VA center where we went underground into a conference room and we really lost connection. We had a hotspot, and we were forced to test this backup solution we had been preparing, which was a offline speech-to-text that ran on the glasses and, thankfully, it worked really well. It was a sink-or-swim moment, but we had so many of those moments that we actually just reverted to, “You know what, this just has to work standalone,” so that you take them out of the box, you turn on the power button and then it’d just start captioning because you don’t need WiFi, you don’t need a phone, you don’t need anything. That became our primary focus of “let’s make this thing work really well without any need for any connection”.
What we also learned was customization of how the captions display is really important to people. Everybody has different preferences and how they want to see this new information. The easiest way to give them that ability to customize is actually through an app. The app, really, all that does right now is just it allows you to customize how the glasses work. You don’t need the app. Maybe you just set it up once and you never need the app again because you have it customized and that’s good, but it’s not something that people would depend on all the time.
Josh Anderson:
Nice. I love how you show that necessity made you test and use that because, yeah, you’re not always going to be somewhere where there is WiFi available and, of course, that would be the one situation where you probably really, really need them to work. I love that the things are self-contained.
Alex, Marilyn, what if I’m in a noisy area, a crowded bar, a concert or restaurant just because I was surprised when we were at the conference, there were tons of people around, but yet I got the captions pretty well just talking one-on-one even though there was a lot of background noise, how are they able to, I don’t know, differentiate the person I’m trying to listen to from maybe the noise around me?
Alex Westner:
What’s interesting about speech-to-text is these systems are built with noisy audio. You can put noisy audio through a speech-to-text system that is a well-designed, a well-established speech-to-text system, and it’ll hold up pretty well in noise, whereas hearing devices tend to, unfortunately, amplify the noise as much as they do the speech. If you’ve got a speech-to-text system that its only purpose in life is to listen for speech, whether there is noise or not, it’s going to do its darndest to make sure that it can identify that speech, whereas hearing aids are just trying to help your brain potentially listen to anything that’s important. Having that singularly focused technology in this case really helps in that situation.
Marilyn Morgan Westner:
In addition, there are times, Josh, when, you’re right, it can be so noisy all around you that it is really challenging. We were just in a cafe the other day. We were trying to test this translate. The glasses can translate between languages, but it’s at the very early stages and we were testing that. It was so loud, I was sitting across from Alex and the young man that we were testing with, and I couldn’t barely hear them and, the glasses, they were struggling a little bit on their own, but we had this tiny little remote, wireless microphone that we give to people in situations like that. A little receiver will plug into the back of the glasses and a person can either wear the little lav mic or they can hold it, and that will really tune out all of the background noise and really just focus on the voices. That’s a little extra added thing that we give.
Josh Anderson:
Nice. I love that. That’s going to to be great for, I mean, I think of all the different situations where something like this is… and not just face-to-face, but also church or if I’m somewhere watching a presentation or something. Having that option to actually have a mic as well so, if I’m not, oh, close enough to them to really get the sound or if maybe the sound or acoustics in the room aren’t very good, I could still be able to get that. I love that’s an option for folks.
Alex Westner:
Yeah, and that tiny little mic has a 65-foot range. In those examples you mentioned at a house of worship or an educational setting, as long as you’re sitting within 65 feet of where you want to place the microphone, you’re going to be able to pick up that speech really clearly.
Josh Anderson:
Nice. Nice. Very nice. Well, I know you guys have tons of these probably, but could you tell me a couple of stories maybe about folks’ reaction to using the glasses and maybe, I always hate to say changed their lives, that almost makes it sound way too big, but how it was able to make a little bit of a difference in their life?
Alex Westner:
I think the most moving stories we’ve experienced were at various VA centers just working with veterans who lost their hearing during their service. There’s a few stories, but one of them, a gentleman who has severe hearing loss hasn’t been able to have a conversation with his audiologist. He can speak fine, but he just can’t hear her at all, doesn’t really want to go through the cochlear implant surgery. That just doesn’t feel right for him, and I don’t blame him, like brain surgery, wow. He will speak to her. She writes back to him on an erasable whiteboard, and he puts the glasses on and he got used to them pretty quickly and, at some point, the audiologist said, “Do you realize you and I have never had a conversation?” and he just had this big smile.
Boy, that was incredible. He didn’t leave the room. It was supposed to be like a 15-minute session to test them, and he stayed for two hours. He wouldn’t give him up, and he was just listening to every conversation. I think he just couldn’t believe all of the stuff that he could hear and engage with. That was moving. There’s so many more stories like that.
Marilyn Morgan Westner:
We were also told that he just got married. We haven’t had the update post-marriage, but we were told that he was going to wear them in his ceremony so he could actually see the vows instead of because, as Alex said, he couldn’t hear. Yeah, that was really powerful. One of my favorite stories also is we got a letter in the mail one day from an 11-year-old girl, and she drew pictures and she said, “When I grow up.” She’s hard of hearing, she wears hearing aids and she really struggles. She said that, when she grows up, she wants to work for us because she’s so excited. She loves to read, and she hates her hearing aids so much. They hurt her ears. They give her headaches. She really wanted to try the glasses and then, when she did, she loved them. We were really skeptical. We were like, “Really? Are these going to fit on a little girl? Is she going to wear them?” They’re big-frame glass, and she liked them. They worked really well for her. So that was an adorable little heartwarming story as well.
Josh Anderson:
Nice, and make sure you definitely keep her in mind if you’re hiring in about seven years because it sounds like you might have a pretty good team member coming out of that also. Alex, Marilyn, what kind of phase is Xander currently in? If I wanted to go and order them, is that something I can do? Where are you at in the whole process?
Alex Westner:
You can. We started taking pre-orders the day before Thanksgiving, and we’re starting to fulfill them now. We took pre-orders because we didn’t know the level of demand and supply. I’m even grateful that we did take pre-orders because the demand has been very high and our supply is relatively limited. That all said, yeah, you can place a pre-order now and we’ll start engaging with you and keep you updated on where you are in the queue, but we’re hoping to deliver all those glasses by the end of June.
There’s one interesting thing, being an assistive technology update, something that Marilyn and I learned really experiencing at ATIA was that hearing is not as commonly attended to, I would say, from assistive tech centers. It’s a lot of blind, low vision, mobility. I think there’s an assumption that hearing care is resolved, it’s taken care of by audiology and hearing aids. I think there needs to be a little more of an awareness that, no, it’s not. It’s not that easy. I think it really is a big assistive tech problem that we all need to pay attention to.
Josh Anderson:
It is. The entire time I’ve been doing this for the last 12 years or somewhere in there, it seems like, yeah, it’s hearing aids, it’s cochlear implants. “Well, you can type on your phone. What’s the problem?” It just seems like it’s been the one thing that’s way back. Why I like Xander and some of the other things, I love the way that it’s self-contained. We work with folks sometimes who are deaf or hearing impaired and work in a hospital setting. There can’t always be an ASL interpreter there. There can’t always be other things, but if I’ve got something self-contained, I could still talk to the patient, get the information from them and they don’t know any different.
There’s nothing really that falls through the cracks and there’s not some translation app on a phone or something that’s going to need WiFi, connect to a cloud and send information on. It makes a big difference and, for the longest time, there was nothing like that out there. There was no way to accommodate that need, except for, I think you mentioned it, the whiteboard and the writing. It was the way to get around those issues. No. I think it is something that maybe people are noticing. I know, Alex, when we talked the first time, you said the blind or visually impaired was the way you were thinking about going.
Alex Westner:
Yeah. Yeah. When we were first looking at AR for disabilities, the first idea that popped into our heads wasn’t actually hearing. It was about vision. It was about can we use these cameras built into glasses to analyze the visual world and describe what’s happening as speech in the speakers so that people could hear what they’re seeing. It was very similar ideas Marilyn was saying of sensory substitution. To your point, there are a lot of companies and a lot of research and a lot of focus on those kinds of assistive technologies for blind and low vision, and the hearing side is relatively neglected in terms of R&D. It’s really just hearing aids. That’s it.
Josh Anderson:
It’s all amplification and, somehow, that’s supposed to make it better, but like you said, most folks I know that even wear hearing aids turn them down sometimes because it just makes it overwhelming or a little too much. If our listeners do want to find out more or maybe get on that list, what are the best ways for them to do that?
Alex Westner:
Go right to our website. It’s xandr.tech, X-A-N-D-E-R, dot, T-E-C-H, or you can even go to xanderglasses.com, and that’ll route to the xander.tech as well.
Josh Anderson:
Awesome. Awesome. We will put links to that down in the show notes so that folks can easily find that. Alex, Marilyn, thank you so much for coming on the show, for telling us about XanderGlasses, for letting me get a hands-on and try of them down at ATIA. I really did enjoy it. I enjoyed meeting you in person, and really a pleasure to have you back on the show.
Alex Westner:
Thank you so much.
Marilyn Morgan Westner:
Thank you so much. You and your whole team were just so amazing. We were so thrilled to meet you. You guys are just wonderful. We appreciate what you do so much.
Josh Anderson:
Oh, thank you so much. Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124. Send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org or shoot us a note on Twitter, @indataproject. Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com.
A special thanks to Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.