Hosts Eamon McErlean and Joe Devon interview Molly Lazarus, Director of Remarkable, an accelerator for accessibility-focused startups. Molly discusses her personal connection to disability, her career path from special education teacher to startup founder, and her current work supporting companies which create innovative accessibility solutions. Eamon and Joe also interview Arman Nobari and Anthony Gibson, co-founders of Good Trouble, one of the startups participating in Remarkable's accelerator cohort. Good Trouble is a games technology company focused on making video games more accessible.
OUTLINE:
00:00 Opening Teaser
01:29 Introduction
02:08 How Accessibility Became Part of Molly's Career Path
09:33 Lessons Learned From Working In Start-Ups
13:03 Some of the Companies in Remarkable's Accelerator Cohort
17:21 How Companies Are Chosen by Remarkable
19:27 Remarkable's Funding As A Non-Profit Organization
21:34 How Does Molly Use AI In Her Daily Life
25:20 How Will AI Play A Role In Accessibility
30:20 Startups In Remarkable's Accelerator Cohort This Year
34:54 Introduction To Good Trouble
38:21 How Good Trouble's Co-Founders Teamed Up
40:03 How Accessibility Hardware Benefits A Person With A Disability
41:53 Introduction To AbleToPlay
46:28 How AbleToPlay Has Benefited A Family With Special Needs
48:10 About Vault Labs
53:32 Wrap Up
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EPISODE LINKS:
Remarkable
https://www.remarkable.org
How I AI Podcast
https://www.youtube.com/@howiaipodcast
ServiceNow Releases Voice Agents as part of the AI Experience
https://www.servicenow.com/community/servicenow-ai-platform-blog/servicenow-releases-voice-agents-as-part-of-the-ai-experience/ba-p/3419367
Remarkable 2025 Accelerator US Cohort
https://www.remarkable.org/blog-posts/remarkable-2025-accelerator-us-cohort
Google's Project Relate
https://sites.research.google/relate/
The Ask Grandma Project
https://www.askgrandma.co
Blueberry Technology
https://www.blueberry.technology
Glidance
https://glidance.io
WheelPad
https://www.wheelpad.com
Good Trouble
https://www.goodtrouble.games
AbleToPlay
https://abletoplay.com/pilot
Microsoft Super Bowl Commercial
https://youtu.be/vQYzsiVscNg
Vault Labs
https://vaultlabs.co
Molly Lazarus
https://www.linkedin.com/in/mollymlevitt/
Arman Nobari
https://www.linkedin.com/in/armannobari/
https://armannobari.com
Anthony Gibson
https://www.linkedin.com/in/agibson/
- If we're talking impact, just kind of like how we change lives, two of the startups from last year's cohort, one is called We Hear You. They make a door opener that allows you to make any door an accessible door. And so all you have to do is have an outlet and a drill and you can make any door in your home open automatically. You can open it with a hotel key card. You can open it with all sorts of things. Another company from last year was called WheelPad, and they essentially make accessible modular homes that can attach to a house, comes with an accessible bathroom, bedroom, a kitchen, and really overnight you're able to stay at home in ways that many people who are suddenly injured are often heading to rehab facilities and they have to stay there until their house can be accommodated or they have to move.
- Good Trouble is a games technology company that is obsessed with the notion that accessibility in games is this fundamental unlock. And for gamers, that's the difference between getting invited to the fun and not being able to play. And for game studios, it's really a foundational part of any successful games business and we're building solutions to serve both sides of that.
- Welcome to episode 12 of Accessibility and Gen AI, the podcast where we talk to the people shaping the world of accessibility and artificial intelligence. I'm Joe Devon, joined by my co-host, Eamon McErlean and today we're speaking with my friend, Molly Lazarus, who's director of remarkable.org, an accelerator for accessibility focused startups. I've been fortunate enough to be around Molly's orbit for several years and you won't find a more wonderful group and smart group of people anywhere. Molly, welcome to the pod.
- Thank you for having me.
- Welcome, Molly, delighted to have you today. We haven't met in person, but it's a pleasure to meet you virtually. You've worn a lot of hats throughout your career, right? I believe you were a special ed teacher, funder, business founder and CEO, but you've had that theme or that thread throughout your career of always helping people and you've spoken publicly about your personal connection to disability. Can you share a little bit about that with us and how that kind of tied into your career path?
- Yeah, so my disability connection started, well before I knew I had my own disability, but my mom had ALS, which is a neurodegenerative disease. When I was six years old, she was diagnosed. And so if you know about ALS, you know that throughout the progression you end up needing a lot of different assistive technologies and a lot of different supports. This was in the nineties, so there were a lot less than there are now, but it gave me my first window into accessibility and kind of what the world looks like for people who are disabled and what it really is lacking in that area as well. So I always had disability as part of my life. I'd been working at camps. I thought that the way to impact disability as an adult was through teaching, which is why I ended up teaching. As you've mentioned, I've worn a lot of hats since I was a teacher, but in the process of doing so, I actually was diagnosed with ADHD myself. So it's been interesting to kind of come in at that lens of neurodivergence and realize, oh, interesting. Like a lot of these things that have both been my Achilles heel and my superpower actually have a name. And I think for those of us who have been diagnosed late in life, that's a little bit of a relief to be able to be like, ah, that's what I'm dealing with and there are supports.
- Yeah that's what I'm asking what was your reaction to that diagnosis like?
- You know, it came after a lot of burnout. I was really, really struggling and I was working at a lot of different like high level startups with like a lot going on and I was just burning out. And I realized like maybe this is something else and so when I eventually got the diagnosis. It was such a interesting realization to be like, oh, the reason you're burning out is because to focus you have to work so hard and basically pretend like the computer is on fire and if you don't answer this email, it will all go up in flames, like that's how you've operated your whole life. And actually, you know, getting support and figuring out how to approach from a different perspective. There are things out there that can help and it's made it all feel a little bit less chaotic and a little bit more understandable.
- You know, what's great about this podcast is I've known you for some years now, you've invited me to some amazing events, but I think it would be awkward for me to go to you and say something like, you know, your career started as an educator in special ed, what challenges did you encounter as a teacher that led to the creation of BrightLoop? It just doesn't roll off the tongue in daily conversation, but now I can really find out a lot more information. So I would love to hear more about that journey as a teacher and how like so many other startups led to the creation of something great.
- Yeah, I appreciate that. And Joe, it sounds like I have to turn the tables on you at some point and find out your whole life story. But in the meantime, so I started working in the space as a teacher and I was noticing that every single kid I taught first and second grade, every single kid in my class needed something different. And I was taking notes. I didn't know I had ADHD at the time, but I was taking notes on like 500 sticky notes, being like this kid needs this tomorrow to be more effective. Like this kid needs to understand their consonants or whatever it was at the time. And so I was doing it from a lot of different perspectives and realizing that to effectively teach a room of kids where some know their letters and some can read chapter books, personalization is really the only way forward. And so at the time I just reached out to some friends at MIT and I was like, "Hey, I need this thing for my classroom, can you like help me build it?" And some other teachers in the school started using it. And at some point, I mean this was a while ago, this is probably 2012, someone was like, "You're running a startup." And I was like, "Sure." And I googled, what is a startup? That was really my entryway into being like, oh, you know, you can see a problem in the world, you can create a solution and you can bring that solution to other people and there are people who just do this as their career. And interestingly enough, you know, once I googled what is a startup, we joined a bunch of accelerators, we got into Y Combinator, we ended up really diving into the startup world. But it really was through the lens of, hey, like it's overwhelming to be a teacher and if you're gonna do it well, you have to do it personalized. And you know, I think every teacher knows that, but it's been a throughline for my career. Even now, like I think some of the things that make me the most effective at running an accelerator are the things that made me an effective first grade teacher.
- But that is a transition, right? It's a transition from the classroom to the whole corporate world, including like Silicon Valley. Did you move there, physically move there as well?
- We did. We did. We were, at the time and we moved out there from Y Combinator. It was required that you move out. And I was in their education arm so it was like the OG team of like Geoff Ralston, Jessica Livingston, Paul Graham, like all of us 12 startups and like a bunch of folks that are now kind of the best known names in the startup space. And so yeah, I really, really dove into it.
- And then that transitioned into Remarkable, is that correct?
- Many startups in between, but I did find my way to Remarkable. I ran my startup for about four years and then I worked at a few other education companies in the valley before realizing that I really wanted to bring the experiences I had into disability tech. Like, there's a lot there and I felt like the education impact wasn't exactly what I hoped for and I felt like there was an opportunity here. And at the time, I didn't know the ecosystem here and so I ended up cold emailing our sister organization, now our sister organization, but I cold emailed Remarkable in Australia and I was like, "Hey, I think I'm gonna build something like this in the US. Can I pick your brain?" Turned out they were also working with a nonprofit in New York that wanted to build it and one thing led to another and I was lucky enough to get the opportunity to build something that I really care about without having to fundraise for it all by myself, which I'm sure any startup founder can agree is a true delight.
- Before we dive into Remarkable a little bit deeper, like during those four years of going through and working with many different startups, were there any, like, I'm sure there's a lot of lessons learned as we all do, but were any that stand out to you that either came as a shock or came as really a hard lesson to learn that, you know, you pass on for anyone that's pretty generic for anyone doing startups?
- I think it's the most stereotypical answer in the book, but I think watching failure, feeling failure. Being a part of startups, big and small, after I left my company, you learn so much, right? And ironically, it's a teaching metaphor, I suppose, but I've always thought about how do you create the skills that you need and how do you put them in your backpack so that the next place you go, you have the skills that you maybe were like, oh, if I had had this. And so when I was running my startup, you know, we did quite well, but I realized that, you know, as a teacher, in addition to not knowing what a startup was, I also could have used more ability in marketing. And so in my next role, I worked my way up to the CMO of an organization and was like, I need to know marketing. I now know marketing. You know, at the next role, I was like, okay, we need to shift and we need to look at this. And so even now, like I love being on this AI podcast 'cause I'm like, it's another thing. It's like what's the next wave of things that you get to learn and you get to take with you, and I think if you can separate your identity from what you're doing, and you can really say, hey, like, I am working hard to make something in the world that I think matters. It's not me. It is a thing. And if that thing doesn't work out, at least I can take these experiences and bring them to the next thing. I think that's the most important thing and that's what we talk to startup founders about. It's like, we are investing in you as disability leaders. We're investing you as people who can make an impact in this space. Whether it is a startup or whether it is the startup that springs out of this startup, like we're investing in the person and the person's capacity to make an impact. Of course, we have returns because we are investors, but I do think that expecting that this one will be the success is actually why a lot of startups fail because they just hold too tightly to that.
- That one thing, yeah. No, it's a great answer. I think with startups, again, to wearing multiple hats, you have to wear multiple hats, but you have, to a certain degree, take out the ego from it. Like you're not going to know it all. There's no way you're going to know it all. But to be humble enough to realize, okay, that is a gap for me, that is something that I need to level up, like, that can go a long way.
- I introduced a friend to an angel investor and he was giving him advice since you brought up investing and what he said is that his investments, he calls them in his own mind, donations, because that sets the right tone for what's gonna come.
- Expectations.
- Yeah, but what's good about what you're doing is that as long as the company does some good out there in the world, that's the most important return. And with that, I would like to ask you what do you feel like? I know you don't... They're all your babies so you don't wanna preference one over the other.
- Never.
- But if you can give an example or two of what you feel are some of the most impactful results that you've seen from some of your cohort, we would love to hear good stories.
- Yeah, gosh, there's so many great stories. And there's so many companies at different stages 'cause we bring in companies that are consumer goods. We bring in companies that sell to corporations. We bring in companies that are going through the FDA process and were in our cohort three years ago and are still working on their FDA submissions and so stage really makes a difference. But if we're talking impact, just kind of like how we change lives, two of the startups from last year's cohort, one is called We Hear You. They make a door opener that allows you to make any door an accessible door. And so all you have to do is have an outlet and a drill and you can make any door in your home open automatically. You can open it with a hotel key card. You can open it with all sorts of things. And if you're in a wheelchair, you know how often, even in your own home, you have to ask for help. And so they were telling me recently that there was like this maybe four or 5-year-old kid who had never been able to leave their house independently because they needed somebody to open the front door, right? Like simple as that and it's like, wow, I can leave my house. Like what a huge change. Another company from last year was called WheelPad, and they essentially make accessible modular homes that can attach to a house. And so if you have a sudden disability or you know, one of the stories they often tell is, they're a Vermont company, there was a racially motivated shooting in Vermont and it left the victim paralyzed. And it was a family that wouldn't have been able to afford to make their house accessible and they were able to, you know, within a very short amount of time, attach this accessible home to the family's home. A little connector comes with an accessible bathroom, bedroom, kitchen. And really overnight you're able to stay at home in ways that many people who are suddenly injured are often heading to rehab facilities and they have to stay there until their house can be accommodated or they have to move. And so from a quick impact perspective, those are just two. Those are two of the kind of more accessible ones. Like certainly we see companies across the space who are, you know... Cephable is now working with lots of large organizations around how do we make AI more accessible across the board? How do we make interacting with our computers more accessible? We will hear about a few of our companies in this year's accelerator and we'll meet one on this call. But, you know, Blueberry Tech is solving the problem of how do we get people in an airport from that last mile transfer. You know, they told me recently that, I'm gonna blank on the actual airport, but one of the big airports in the south, they have 400 people land every single hour who require a wheelchair transfer.
- Wow.
- And they only have a hundred pushers to be able to do that. And so from a dignity perspective and from the opportunity to be able to get from point to point, they've created this autonomous vehicle that allows you to, it automatically deploys to the gate, it gets moved. It decreases the injury for all those pushers because the loads are less. They have to do... You know, I was at the airport the other day and I saw an older man pushing two people while lugging a suitcase behind him. And I was like, I see this. Like I know this is a problem but then you look at that and you're like, wow, like this could really change a lot.
- How do you choose? Like is there a specific criteria that you have to go through? I know, I'm sure it's not all financially based, but what is the criteria if there is such a thing?
- There's a criteria. The answer is that's really difficult. We probably... Should anyone wanna, you know, fund the nonprofit, we could take more but at this rate, we take around 5% of our applicants who apply every year. And I send emails to some folks who are in that like 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 being like, I'm pulling my hair out. Like, you would be in here if we had money. So it's very difficult even with our criteria, but we look at first, are you a Remarkable startup? And so what we mean by Remarkable is are you doing something meaningfully different that will make an impact on the space? And so a better pen is not necessarily what we are looking for, but we're looking for something that feels transformative in that particular area and that we haven't seen this problem approached in that unique way before. We are generally in the US taking companies that are post-product, post revenue, unless you're a med tech device. And so there's a few exceptions here and there, but for the most part, we really wanna take companies at the point that we think with our current resources, we're most likely to accelerate because an accelerator, it's a contract, right? The startup is giving you their equity, they're giving you their time and I take that really seriously. I think that we shouldn't be taking companies that we don't believe that we can accelerate. And so there will be some companies where I'll say, hey, like come to me in a year and like we can really go, but the stage you're in right now, it wouldn't be a good fit to apply this year. And you could, but like, I think it would be a disservice for both of us to have you in the cohort this year because I don't think the impact we could make would be there.
- And you mentioned the funds. Where does that come from? Is it across the board or a certain amount of donations from individuals? Is it public or both?
- Yeah, so we are a nonprofit and we are 501 . You can go to donate. In the US, we are funded through the Cerebral Palsy Alliance Research Foundation, which is cparf.org. We take funds from that. We take funds from major donors. It's an area where you find a lot of people who are like, man, I couldn't have put my money on like the name of a hospital but actually I can see the impact that investing in these startups makes. Now the interesting thing that, you know, if you think about the horizon of return, we're not there yet. We've only been running and investing in the US. Running in the US for four years, investing in the US for three. But in theory, we take equity in the startups. And so hopefully if a few of our startups are successful, there's a regenerative capital aspect that will allow us to say, hey, we can keep running, but we're not like asking for every dime to do it. And I think from a startup perspective, having gone through YC like, sure, I wanna line the pockets of the wealthiest people with my equity, like not really. Like I'd rather put my equity into something that was saying, hey, we're gonna really support you and then if you're really successful, another founder making another amazing disability focused product, will get that funding. And so it feels like a little better for me. It's like capitalism lite.
- That's funny. What I was really impressed with was all of these great technology companies, you know, just companies that do different foundational work in AI and different aspects of technology. And I love this podcast that's called "How I AI" and I'm gonna ask you, how do you AI, how do you use it in your daily life?
- It's an interesting question. If you had asked me this two weeks ago, I would've had a very different answer. But I was speaking at a conference two weeks ago, at a like general startup conference and I ended up spending a lot of time in the speaker's room with an AI researcher and like, wow, how AI is changing rapidly. In the short term, like yes, I use the tools, I explore the tools, I wanna know them but I think what I realized is there's some horizons to how we need to be thinking about AI. And the first horizon for me is I need to deeply understand what's happening and I need to make what's happening really accessible and in plain language so that our community can understand what is happening. But I think that's a short term thing. I think the world as we know it, if it continues in the direction that it is perceived to continue is going to be a different world in five years. And so I think that we're saying what does it mean to AI now and then in five years, I think we're saying what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to, what are the experiences that are actually foundationally investible. And are they actually now people experiences and no longer technology experiences and what does education look like? I think there's so many questions that I am starting to have now that I'm like, hey wait, AI is cool. AI today is cool and I'm finding it's making my workflow easier and things like that but actually the better question is how will I AI in five years and maybe like how will AI me in five years?
- That's a good one too.
- Like what are we thinking about in five years? And I think, yeah, I'm sure, I imagine you have guests that talk about this a lot and you think about this a lot, but-
- It changes every couple of days. It's like-
- I feel like every minute. You know, I subscribe to The Neuron and that's been such a good source of information to just follow the ball of what everyone is doing and that's great. And I just can't believe how quickly our world is changing. And I think, we, as people who are focused on inclusion and disability and education, thinking beyond year one, year two, year three and thinking actually fundamentally what does the world look like in five to 10 years and how do we make sure that the people we care about aren't left behind again, I think is really important.
- You know, that's one of the reasons why Joe and I started this podcast and that's the real reason because unfortunately as we well know, accessibility was an afterthought for many years and many companies playing catch up. With the speed that AI is going at, we cannot afford to do that again. We just can't. So we gotta be not on that bus but helping drive that bus as we move forward, period.
- Yeah, and very grateful that you all have taken that and are taking the steps there because I could not agree more. And it's really a moment that we need to all be looking at critically.
- Well, the solutions that are being submitted to yourself, do you see AI playing more and more role in those?
- Oh yeah, significantly. And I think, in the short term, I think that's really, really good. I think, you know, like you said, the internet was built inaccessibly. We have an opportunity, a shift point here to say we can build it differently. I think there is a lot of good that AI can do in the disability community in the short term. And I think there's a lot of things that could become problematic in the long term, but the tools themselves that AI can create and the way that AI can make processes more accessible, even if it's just generic AI allowing someone who's blind to be able to like order anything that they need or, you know, the simplicity of chatting with an agent over having to deal with inaccessible webpage, I think is certainly even just at a minimum, great. But I think that we're creating a world that there will be a lot less jobs and there already are not a lot of job opportunities for people with disabilities. And so we're looking ahead, what does that mean? You know, in the short term, is it skilling up folks with disabilities so that they can stay in the employment world or they can join in the employment world with new skills or you know, how are we safeguarding our communities such that people with disabilities aren't another casualty of not having enough work opportunities and not making those work opportunities accessible.
- Molly, the work you're doing plays an awesome role in that. It really does. Like showing to everyone, you know, those individuals with different disabilities, you know, not only can they not be productive, they can be more productive and the unique view that they have on how to approach different tasks and different challenges, like it's phenomenal. It really is phenomenal the work you do just to shine a light on that.
- I know. Thank you. Thank you. We had a founder that applied and definitely, he was one of the ones I was like, I desperately want you in here. It's called Sonora AI. You may have met him. He is a blind man who is creating like a voice agent. And his big theory was, hey, the internet was built inaccessibly, so blind people have been listening to this stuff read to us forever. If anybody should build a more accessible voice agent, it should be the blind community because you all aren't gonna wanna do what we've done for the last like 15 years. And unfortunately, it's a really crowded space so he has a very uphill climb. But I do hope, whether it's him or whether they bring him into whatever the winner is, like these are the exact things where you say we're suddenly going to use things that a lot of people would've called accommodations a while ago. And so now how do we, instead of just pretending that we can get user data, like how do we bring in the people who really struggled with these systems before and how do we get them to say, oh, you're gonna realize that with your agent, this is gonna drive you nuts. And so I think there's some cool opportunities, to your point about the innovation and the perspective of people with disabilities.
- Yep, we're doing that right now actually at ServiceNow, doing these voice agents and voice interaction and building out that conversational AI, not just voice and text but voice commands, voice navigation across the entire platform. So we've always found it's imperative to work with individuals with different disabilities as you build those. So think about speech impediments, as an example for voice, unless you do that, you're not going to have a collective cohesive solution. You're just not. So better do that upfront absolutely.
- It's good that you brought that up because at one of your events, Molly, you mentioned you had Google's Project Relate and project.
- Project, yeah.
- Before we bring on your guests, let's talk about that project, whatever you know, you wanna share about that. But also like Ask Grandma. You did mention Blueberry already Glidance. How about if you share a little bit about what those other two folks in your cohort do before we bring in your guests?
- That sounds good. So this year in our cohort, we have four startups. I mentioned Blueberry already. The two others that are in the cohort that you won't meet today are Glidance. So they are founded by a man who had retinitis pigmentosa who lost his vision and they're making an autonomous guide vehicle of sorts, not vehicle, I'm confusing, but they're making like a kind of a play on a guide dog. So you can hold it kind of next to you like you would a guide dog. It looks at obstacle detection. It can bring you to your location. Guide dogs are really expensive and really hard to get. And a bulk of the population who are blind actually are not born blind. And so when you're born blind, you have a lot of opportunities to learn the white cane and to be supported by orientation and mobility specialists who teach you how to use it. But increasingly as we live longer, a lot of folks are losing their vision later in life. And so Glidance is not only creating a a mobility device that allows people to navigate, you know, if they're blind but also a very important part is that if you become blind later, and you'll never learn a white cane. Like you'll never take the time to kind of skill up in this area that is challenging to learn at first. And so they're really opening doors for people who maybe would've stayed home or wouldn't have been able to engage to get out in the community. Ask Grandma is a-
- Wait, I have follow up question on Glidance?
- Yeah.
- Does it have to go to the bathroom?
- It doesn't and you don't have to feed it.
- Oh perfect. Okay.
- Take it to the vet. No vaccines.
- Great.
- Ask Grandma is a company that is founded by a Native American founder. He is a speech language pathologist and he was noticing in his tribal home visits that families who have a lot of medical mistrust and a lot of mistrust of the system were having children that were having developmental delays that were preventable just because they didn't... They were, you know, kids having kids, they were younger parents or they just didn't know kind of some of the more traditional like speech therapy processes. And so he's building a tool that will rely on AI in some capacity. We're kind of working out what that looks like. But it's called Ask Grandma and Grandma being the kind of traditional matriarch of the tribe. And so he's looking at how do you create a grandma like AI agent that you're able to have these conversations about your children's development with, you're able to connect out to the providers in the tribal communities who support you. But it is deeply embedded in the cultural teachings of the tribes and the communities that they serve. And obviously there are many tribes so that will be different based on location. But he's based in New Mexico and has done some work in the Northeast. So these are kind of the areas that he's starting. And then the final company is Good Trouble and we actually have them on the call today. Arman and Anthony started out and are working on a incredible project around accessibility and video games. Their first kind of foray into this is AbleToPlay, which is a way that you can find video games that are truly accessible to your disability, to your needs, to your things. But they have a bigger vision around how do we help games and studios to become more accessible. And I won't say too much 'cause they'll just blow you away on their own. But it's an amazing group of four startups and we're thrilled to have this group and I'm really excited that Arman and Anthony will be here to chat with you all today.
- Hello.
- Hey, there.
- Hi, everyone.
- Just like that.
- How's it going?
- Good, good. Would you like to do a brief introduction?
- Hey there, my name is Arman Nobari. I'm the CEO and co-founder of Good Trouble
- And my name is Anthony Gibson. I'm the CTO and co-founder of Good Trouble.
- First of all, I love the name. I love the name, Good trouble. Yep. Can you just give us an overview before, I think we're gonna get a demo, but an overview of what Good Trouble really is?
- Yeah, absolutely. So Good Trouble is a games technology company that is obsessed with the notion that accessibility in games is this fundamental unlock. And for gamers, that's the difference between getting invited to the fun and not being able to play. And for game studios, it's really a foundational part of any successful games business and we're building solutions to serve both sides of that. I'm happy to kind of dive into the journey of getting here too, because this absolutely wasn't just an overnight idea. It's very much one of those classic problems, you know, living through it and then needing to build a solution.
- No good ideas are. No good ideas are.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- I'd love to hear about the background. I'd love to.
- Sure. So, you know, earlier in life, I was having a pretty normal, you know, teenage years having a great time in high school. And one day, I got pulled out class and I was told, hey, you have a really aggressive form of cancer. It totally upended my life. So I went from, you know, playing soccer after class and, you know, enjoying my friend groups to basically inpatient chemotherapy for what ended up being a really aggressive form It's a pretty rare cancer. It was stage three when it was found, nearly stage four. And, you know, games were my escape during that time. You know, going through such an intense experience in, you know, 2004, 2005, so before really the rise of even mobile games on your phone, which is kind of crazy to think about. You know, I didn't have much. Yeah, I had some great books, but I also had my uncle's ThinkPad laptop that could, you know, run some games and some good hospital friends that I would try and play games with. But, you know, bad accessibility prevented them from playing games like how I could and I took that personally. So after beating cancer, you know, I kicked cancer's butt, I went on to get a degree in communications and that's where I found a great friendship with this gentleman here, Anthony Gibson. We were fast friends, just builders at heart. And you know, we ran one business together before called Vault Labs, which Anthony will tell you about later on and ultimately we decided, you know, we're really good at building really disruptive technology. We both had career paths that touched multiple startups and even stints at Google. We want use our ability as technologists and really change makers to help affect the status quo of inclusion in an industry that we love, which is the games industry.
- Awesome story and congratulations on the cancer, honestly.
- Ah, thank you. I appreciate that.
- Very cool. Very cool. How did you guys meet? I'm always interested in how people met. Was it through work at Google or prior to that?
- I love telling this story. We met in college and we had a mutual friend that was a longtime friend of mine and had a class with Arman. And in the middle of the day, ran across campus, came and found me and said, oh my goodness, you have to meet this other person. He's basically just like you, but there's a different version of you and you gotta meet him. And so that was like the initial connection point. As Arman said, we were fast friends, we immediately hit it off and really have been working together ever since, both in like a personal friendly side project capacity and then over the years, building businesses together, which has been really fun.
- You know, it's funny, when I was younger I did a lot of gaming and then I have not really done it just because I know that I would be too addicted to it. When I get into something, like now AI, I do nothing else and it's terrible and so gaming is one of those things. But after I co-founded Global Accessibility Awareness Day, the gaming community was so involved in accessibility. They would always talk about it. And then Microsoft, one year, announced the Xbox adaptive controller for it and then they released a Super Bowl video that was amazing about just showing people in a way that I've tried so hard to explain to people why accessibility is important. And now I just show them that video, which thankfully Microsoft has allowed me to use in presentations and hopefully in this video, in this podcast. But I'm curious, what do you all think about the different hardware that's now out there? And could you just explain how it works? 'Cause I think that's an important element that people may not get.
- Sure, I'm really happy to. I think that mentioning the Microsoft Xbox Adaptive Controller, you know, any conversation that's going deep into really the history and impact of games accessibility has to mention that, but there's also, you know, a really interesting and growing vibrant ecosystem of peripherals and solutions to help make games more accessible ultimately for the end consumer. So to kind of paint the picture for folks that are maybe unfamiliar with modern gaming or gaming hardware, you know, you provide inputs to a game through some means. Maybe it's moving the mouse, maybe it's a keyboard, maybe it's a classic sort of two-handed controller that maybe you've seen in some other capacity with joysticks and buttons. And games are really demanding. Sometimes, you have to do multiple things at once. Some games are quite demanding in terms of dexterity or repetition or, you know, fatigue. And there are some hardware and some software solutions for gamers to make that easier. So the Microsoft Xbox Adaptive Controller is a series of alternative input devices that address certain needs and limitations that people may have to providing the inputs to play a game. For example, you know, maybe someone has a limb difference and they need a larger button to press because the buttons on a standard controller are far too small. Those are the types of accommodations that a lot of these adaptive controller projects support. Sony, you know, has the incredible access controller, which was previously codenamed Project Leonardo. And there's also amazing organizations like Makers Making Change that have to be mentioned in any conversation like this who are pursuing, you know, open source solutions for people with 3D printers or activating their community of makers to make 3D printed alternative input devices that the larger, more mainstream solutions are either to expensive or don't quite fit the needs of the end user. Ultimately, these just help get down and destroy barriers to play. There's a lot of focus on mobility barriers in this area, which is, you know, respectfully one aspect of accessibility barriers in gaming, but it is a tremendously difficult to overcome barrier if these devices weren't available. And it's really incredible because it's the difference between playing a game and finding that favorite and not being able to play.
- So with that, are you able to show us any of the work that you're doing?
- Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to. I'll share a bit about, you know, what AbleToPlay is. So for some context, we make a free website called AbleToPlay. Anyone can go to it at abletoplay.com. And it is a personalized recommendation site for games. So you create a profile, you put in your needs and then we tell you what games are a great fit for your needs. So just for any listeners, I'm showing the landing page on abletoplay.com. And the text says, "Discover accessible games that fit your needs." So the idea here is that we've spent over a year and thousands of hours across our whole team building this really deep resource. This is a collection of qualitative game analysis behind the scenes across hundreds of quality markers so that we can describe a game with very specific regards to accessibility. So for example, games do not report to storefronts or any other authoritative body, a tracking of all accessibility considerations that is in a game. And if they did, it would be overwhelming because if you're really gonna get granular enough, that's gonna be hundreds of things. So we flipped the model on the head and we created a system where you add your needs and preferences to a profile, and then we just rank games by how good of a match they are for your needs. So my recommendations are different than your recommendations because my needs are different than your needs. And this is sort of what it looks like when you use it. I'm showing an amazing game called "Sea of Thieves" and it says, 91% match, great support and it has rankings across vision, mobility, auditory, cognitive, mental health and other needs. And what that's saying is, we've taken in your profile of needs and we've assessed all of these games by your needs, and you can now buy and play "Sea of Thieves" with greater confidence that it's gonna support the type of accessibility considerations you have.
- That's just amazing.
- Thank you.
- Very well done.
- Arman, how do you scale across like thousands and thousands of games to be able to do your due diligence to be able to do that rating?
- Well, we scale very carefully. We currently have a few thousand games on the site, and the answer to that is really taking it slow. It's taken us over a year and a half to get here of really tireless work for our entire team. We crowdsource some of the information. So for example, if a game updates and adds new accessibility support, our community will help us spot that. Our community will let us know, hey, such and such game had an update and they can submit corrections or updates to the game pages. You know, we love our community so much and with the help of our community, that's the only way this site is possible.
- You'd rather make sure it's accurate rather than just... Yep, I love it.
- Absolutely. Just one quick anecdote I love to share about AbleToPlay comes from really the first quarter we launched, which was, you know, it was public earlier this year, even though the project's been under wraps for much longer. We were getting some inquiries from early users who wanted, you know, help using the platform and sharing their experiences and we got this one email from this amazing person. She's a mom, she had two kids. Both of them had a variety of different accessibility needs and their needs were vastly different. The children's needs were unique. And she emailed us and said, "It's always been a struggle buying holiday gifts." For context, we were in a beta period right around the time of Christmas. And she said, you know, "It's always hard buying gifts for my kids because I'm not into gaming, but they are, and I keep getting them games they can't play and I feel bad about that." And, you know, it was amazing to see what an impact this made on their family. She made a profile plugged into her kids' needs and was able to then find basically the perfect Christmas gift for each of them. And she emailed us saying, you know, this was a completely different holiday season for her and her family. You know, it was all smiles and we helped make that moment happen. So even though it's a site really to serve the needs of gamers with disabilities, we see families and even occupational therapists using it to help find the perfect game for someone that they're caring for and, you know, that's what fuels us every day.
- Can you tell us a bit about the Vault Labs? Is that kind of connected to what you're doing now or totally different?
- Yeah, Arman and I, after going to college together and spending our own time working at a few different startups, we came together and co-founded a digital product studio called Vault Labs. And it is a design consultancy firm where we worked with clients of many shapes and sizes ranging from some of the biggest including Google to many other startups of varying degrees of scale. We had one startup that I think went from like a zero to a hundred in the time that we were working with them from all the other initiatives they were pursuing. But that was where we really cut our teeth in working together as a team and building out technical products. So there's a lot of habits and skills that we picked up from that time that carry us through. And it is also the point where I think we first had some initial discoveries around what impact we might be able to make within the video games industry. And that really opened the door for Good Trouble and everything else that came beyond that.
- So I think one really interesting thing about going from Vault Labs, Anthony, into good Trouble is just, it really gave us that perspective of the impact of just more effective tools and software and, you know, the ways that businesses are empowered to achieve their own goals. You know, we spent so many years, you know, building those solutions for other companies and it's really, I think, empowering to be building those for ourselves. And I think that goes into, you know, not just what we've shared today with AbleToPlay, like our ability to spot a serious problem in not just an industry, but that affects real people's lives at the end of the day. But also some of the stuff that we haven't like dug into yet. And also just spoiler alert, there's a lot we can't say, a lot we can't say about the cool things that we're building, but I can shed a bit of light on some context there. Just as a general topic, I think AI is going to be one of the most empowering, if not the most empowering technology for people with disabilities. I think it's an absolutely transformative concept of how to interact with technology and I'm not talking about having ChatGPT give you pictures of hot dogs or something. Like, I'm talking about really being able to overcome barriers to economic, educational and social empowerment for people with disabilities and enabling people with disabilities to live the fullest life they want in whatever direction they wanna take that life. I think it's an amazing technology for that. And that's part of our ultimate vision here is to empower games companies and, you know, beyond with really effective technology solutions that leverage AI not just for the flashy stuff you hear AI talk about often, but as a way to make the hardest, most annoying parts of their work not just really easy, but really easy to connect with. Using AI in, you know, B2B for example, in building SaaS as a way to make work easier and help people connect with the people that will ultimately benefit from their work. It's humanizing their own mission for them in a way that traditional software's unable to. So while I can't get super specific as to what we're building or what we're cooking up, I think once you look past some of the worst behavior that gets all the news in the AI world and really look at how this technology can transform the status quo for billions of people, I think that it's an incredibly exciting time to be building, you know, technological solutions and looking at ways to uplift people and change their lives through these transformative technologies.
- It's a great principle to have. It really is. And, you know, we wish you all the luck in the world with the future of your product. We really do. Making that positive impact in people's lives, it's very cool. Very, very cool.
- Thank you very much. I appreciate that.
- We tease the slightest bit about what this. It's actually on AbleToPlay, so if anyone's curious about learning a bit more about what we're up to, you can go to AbleToPlay.com/pilot. We're piloting some really exciting tools for not just game studios, but really anyone making interactive digital products. And it's really exciting so far and you know, we're so excited to see how the next few months go.
- Well, thank you so much, all of you, for joining and just to wrap things up, if anybody wants to get involved in your work, wants to bring their startup to Remarkable, cut a check, how can they reach you and get involved?
- Yeah, all of the above is welcome. You can find me on LinkedIn at Molly Lazarus, molly@remarkable.org and you can find more about at remarkable.org.
- Anybody interested in AbleToPlay, obviously please go check out abletoplay.com and definitely check out our pilot page if anything we have discussed here sounds intriguing. We also have a discord that we invite people who are passionate about the subjects to come join and be a part of our community.
- And you can find me on LinkedIn. It's just my first and last name, Arman Nobari. A-R-M-A-N N-O-B-A-R-I. Of course, check out abletoplay.com/pilot if you wanna get involved or check out what we're up to. And you can reach me at arman@goodtrouble.team.
- I get the feeling, Arman and Anthony, we'll have you back in maybe about a year, a year and a half. By that time, you'll be huge donators to remarkable.org. It all pays back.
- We better get it on the calendar right now then.
- Yeah.
- There you go.
- Right.
- We wanna know about all the good trouble you've gotten into.
- Absolutely.
- Appreciate that. Yeah, can't wait to come back. Thank you for all the thoughtful questions.
- Thanks guys, we appreciate your time.