Neil Milliken: Hello. I’m Neil Milliken, I'm a white middle-aged male with brown square glasses and a slight stubble and I'm wearing a blue polo shirt. I’m Head of Accessibility at Atos, a systems integrator. That's about me. But I’m more excited to talk about the people on the panel today. This panel is about a greater purpose, and that's developing a diverse talent pipeline. In all areas of technology development it's really important for us to be inclusive and make sure that the teams that are building platform technologies, applications, and developing the content are diverse. This includes people with disabilities as well as people from different racial, ethnic, gender, sexual, cultural, religious and socioeconomic backgrounds. And today, we have a wonderful combination of perspectives we wish to share with you from our panelists and I’m going to ask them briefly to introduce themselves and their areas of focus, particularly in regards to building XR experiences. Let's start with Nina Salomons, founder of the XR diversity initiative.

Nina Salomons: Hello this Nina speaking. I am an Asian middle-aged woman, and I’m wearing a blue shirt with a bookcase in the background. I work and lead the XR diversity initiative in the UK.

Neil Milliken: And can you tell me a little bit about the purpose of the XR diversity initiative?

Nina Salomons: Oh, sure. I thought we were going to go all around.  

Neil Milliken: No. In a little bit.  

Nina Salomons: Sure. I can give you a description. The XR Diversity Initiative is an initiative that is not for profit. We organize workshops which are face to face where you can meet industry professionals and you can learn XR skills without having background in coding or film making and the whole idea is to give individuals from under represented groups the confidence to pursue a career in XR or integrate XR into their business, and continue to hopefully create a more diverse, fresh and innovative space in immersive technologies.  

Neil Milliken: Fantastic. Thank you, Nina. So moving on to you, Christopher, so you started the Black Technology Mentorship Program. Tell me about yourself and about that, please.  

Christopher Lafayette: Hello, Neil. First and foremost I’m happy to be here today with Verizon Media and Cornell Tech and PEAT, and all the wonderful things you're doing and highlighting this very necessary discussion and subject matter in the ecosystem of XR technology. My name is Christopher Lafayette, a Black American who finds himself here in Silicon Valley, Today I’m rocking a purple shirt which I hope looks like a purple shirt, feels like a purple shirt and the translation of the viewing window you're looking at. About a year ago I launched an initiative with extreme vulnerability, frankly, called the Black Technology Mentorship Program. I said that is because I stopped in my tracks of everything that I was doing, I’ve had a desire to be able to mentor people as I have been doing for years now, especially in the XR space, I stopped in my tracks and looked and saw Ahmed Arbery, Brionna Taylor, George Floyd and other individuals and folks that look like me, come from cities where I come from, and I had to ask myself, what am I doing? If not me, then who? So I launched an initiative called the Black Technology Mentorship Program which is a mentee-mentor program that inspires, educates, and brings underserved black communities and communities of color into technology because I’ve come to appreciate as of late that on the subject of XR which stands for extended reality, for those in the audience who may not know, that if we're going to extend reality, we must bring reality with it. On the subject of metaverses you cannot have metaverses without meta people. We will never be as great as we can be at technology until everyone has the opportunity to build it no matter the color, no matter the gender. Technology will never be as great as it can be until we all have accessibility and so I’m looking forward to sharing much and more of what we're working on.

Neil Milliken: Thanks very much. Next I would like to introduce Andreas Forsland of Cognixion. Andreas, can you tell us about yourself and your work?  

Andreas Forsland: Thanks, Neil. High name is Andreas Forsland, I’m the founder and CEO of a technology start-up called Cognixion, c-o-g-n-i-x-i-o-n, you can find us online. So at Cognixion - oh, a little bit about me, so I’m a middle-aged guy, white guy, live in California. I’m from the south from Atlanta. I worked all over the world with previous careers and I am currently wearing a light blue Hawaiian shirt to try and bring some sunshine here today to southern California. Back to Cognixion what we're building is a wearable, augmented reality headset, so it's an HMD, head mounted display, that includes EEG, the technology term for brain sensors, so it's a headset that basically includes brain sensing capability. And so what this means it's the first ever fully integrated system that includes neurotechnology with augmented reality and we're building it as an accessible platform. So, thinking about individuals with extremely wide access needs, specifically neurodiverse and individuals with progressive disorders like ALS, or brain stem strokes, or acquired disorders, working with individuals who have motor and speech disabilities and we're building this technology to augment someone's ability to communicate so if you're familiar with someone who is unable to communicate orally, this will enable them to have easier, faster, natural access to generate speech that can be understood by people around them, and we're also designing it so that it has environmental smart home controls built in, and eventually could be used as a mobility solution for driving power wheelchairs and way finding in the real world. So we call it assisted reality, as a new category of augmented reality, where we're trying to design really useful applications for AR that can be controlled via any kind of input, switch, head movement, and brain control interface through focusing on objects and selecting things. A little bit about us, we've been working on this for about four years now, and along the way, we realized that there is no way to design for others. We had to really adopt a philosophy of for us, by us, and so we co-designed with individuals with a wide variety of disabilities and the design process and I would be happy to talk about that on the panel today.

Neil Milliken: It's really exciting and I’m fascinated around the topics of both neurodiversity and the potential of augmented reality to be an assistive technology. I’m super excited to have you here today. Over to our fourth panelist, and this is Josh Christianson of the Partnership on Inclusive Apprenticeships. Josh, You and I have talked and met before but for the sake of the audience, can you share a bit about yourself and the work your organization does, please.  

Josh Christianson: Sure. Thank you. Very honored to be on this panel with the people doing such interesting and important work. My name is Josh Christianson. I’m a white male, I have a dark gray checkered shirt on that matches my monochromatic gray hair. I’m at my friend's house and there's a picture of Frida Kahlo in the background. But I am currently, I have a background in diversity inclusion and workforce development but mostly in the areas of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic, in my past life. For the last seven years focused on disability and accessibility in the workplace and have been working on various projects out of the U.S. Department of Labor funded by the Office of Disability Employment Policy. Many years until a year ago, I was with PEAT, one of the cosponsors of this event, and glad to stay connected with that. My role is project director on the Partnership on Inclusive Apprenticeships, or PIA. PIA is really set up to design- to support, build, bolster, promote, whatever we can do, about creating inclusive apprenticeships in high growth, high demand. Apprenticeships is a growing field, we're focused on sectors that are the future of work. Our sweet spot is the IT sector and we do work and have a focus on clean energy, finance, health care, other high growth, high demand sectors defined by the Department of Labor but even within those we're often looking at technology and how it's utilized in those sectors. There's a growing future, we all are here, we know this, especially related to XR, that is going to be the employment landscape, the participation landscape, and PIA is really designed to make sure people with disabilities are a part of that. That apprenticeship program, which I can speak specifically to more later are designed for a way that can be inclusive of people with disabilities so they can take advantage of those career growth opportunities. We do have a focus on people with disabilities and specifically I think to XR Access and the concept of inclusive design we know that the more people with disabilities are involved in the development and design of technologies the more they will be inclusive which makes sense and is kind of our starting point with PEAT and PIA and all of this work. But honestly, the more I learn about apprenticeship also, there are many other demographics, traditionally marginalized populations that are target groups for apprenticeship and I think it's a fantastic tool to engage people that have oftentimes been excluded from the workplace, especially cutting-edge workplace and nothing else happens today, please learn about apprenticeships and how it might bolster workforce development in your sector.  

Neil Milliken: Excellent. And I’m also passionate about apprenticeships having worked on some on this side of the pond. Fascinating blend of backgrounds here. As we've heard throughout today, our communities are stressing the importance of co-design and co-developing XR platform technologies, applications, and content, with diverse people, not for them, and, of course, we are taking into account intersectionality because actually we're not one person -- we're to the one trait, we're many, and particularly that around disability. It's the most intersectional of all minority groups. Could each of you share some examples of how teams have directly -- your teams have been directly involved, people with disabilities or other marginalized or under represented groups in XR design and development, maybe Christopher, if you would like to start.  
 
Christopher Lafayette: Of course. Thanks, Neil. This is Chris Lafayette again speaking. With the Black Technology Mentorship Program we're beginning to inspire people and whole company platforms to think differently on what exactly mentorship is and how it actually most effectively impacts change today in technology. And I would say that perhaps the single biggest thirst that we have for social impact programs is the lack of mentorship, guidance and servant leadership. You know, I think one of the consistent themes that I’ve been hearing today at this wonderful conference with all the speakers that have been here, how do we go about actually getting more accessibility built into content development. Well, here what's you're not going to do. You're not going to force developers to say that you need to make sure content x, y, z and inclusive for all people. That's not going to happen. We can inspire people to go and take those initiatives and the drive to work, but I think if we dove a little bit further to consider what would be best to do, is to actually hire the people that we want to buy our products. And if it's being built by communities of color, and look, ecosystems are not hardware and software. Ecosystems are people. When you bring somebody that looks like me into your ecosystem, it's not an affirmative action initiative. When you bring someone that looks like me into your ecosystem, I level up the entire ecosystem. And so what we put a focus on with the Black Technology Mentorship Program is two specific tracks. How do we take career talent people that come from HBCUs, that come from general standard universities, elsewhere, and give them what they need to level up to be force multipliers and complete contributors to product delivery teams and companies such as Verizon or Oculus or others, and how do we get them to contribute on day one to be the best that they can be and through post-modern mentorship development to stay with them when they go and enter into these platforms? We already know they're up against implicit and explicit bias. We know that. I cannot change the hearts and minds of every hiring manager in the world. So what we have to do is, we're taking our talent and unlocking their minds and giving them what they need, equipping them to be able to mitigate implicit and explicit biases they're up against. Look, I began this platform as a kid that's come to Silicon Valley with black skin, living out of my car out of Sunnyvale and Mountain View and other places because I desperately, really truly wanted to be in technology. I created this platform years later and it wasn't just me. It was a lot of the people that helped teach me, women and men alike, technology osmosis by the lay of the land that helped teach me that when I launched this platform, this isn't going to be a black exclusive initiative, that I do not believe it takes one community to lift itself out of a given situation, but I believe that it takes all communities from all cultural backgrounds to help all communities lift itself up as a whole and so we have a makeup of folks from Pixar, designers to Apple engineers and XR to engineers that work for Oculus and elsewhere that make up the body of the Black Technology Mentorship Program and in one year's time, one year's time, we now have representation from 27 different countries, over 171 cities worldwide, and six continents. Here's the kicker, Neil, here's the kicker, we were able to build this whole entire initiative, this one year, with over now 1,000 people in our system, ecosystem, no brick and mortar buildings, and we didn't raise a single dime of any kind of capital at all to do this. This is all from the heart of hardworking people, 31 people internally that are with us, Neil.

Neil Milliken: Yeah, no, I’m fully on board with this because I fully believe in mentorship. Nina, can you tell us a bit more about XRD.  
 
Nina Salomons: Sure. I’m kind of on the same lines with Chris. I came from a film making background and I also had a gaming channel and I experienced an incredible amount of hatred towards me simply because of me being a woman, I think my background, the way I looked and spoke, and it was incredibly disheartening to go to a location and feel like whatever I brought to the table was not valuable and no one was interested in listening to what I had to say, the stories I wanted to tell, and that was a really difficult time period and I realized that the only way to move forward is to create and shift that mentality and I realized that the biggest problem that exists right now in XR is that there are a lack of individuals from under represented groups who have the right skill sets to enter the industry. And I felt, okay, what can I do? What can I offer? And similar to Chris, this is something I’ve been doing since back in 2018. I set up the Women in VR meet up group in London in my free time because I am so passionate and so driven to create a safe space where people can be -- feel heard, can be seen, can get the support that they want because I don't want them to go through the same experience that I went through. I want them to be safe, get support, I want them to ask for help, I want them to figure out how they can tell their story and bring in a new perspective that I believe the community at that time potentially wouldn't have that viewpoint because they weren't thinking outside of the box. We created a system where it's only under represented groups, LBGTQ, African, Asian, ethnic minority, individuals with disabilities, women, lower income background, if you are any of these, you can attend and the workshops we created were 360 film, 360 audio, immersive story telling, movement interaction design, 3D printing, and what was so incredible is that a large number over 50% of the individuals who attended were women, and most of them were over 50, so a lot of them had ended their career and looking for a switch, they were looking to learn new skills and some of the feedback I would like to share is I’ve never felt like I belonged in tech but there are people here like me and I feel like I belong in this community and I do bring value. Or this is an inclusive and fun way of learning every single different aspect of VR and can we make this into a three to five day program. What we usually do is, we do half a day is theory and the other half of the day is practical. So we kind of offer a little bit of both. Over 76% of every attendee is confident after attending XRDI, to pursue a career in immersive technology. I think that showcases how if you come from that background you can gain the confidence, you don't need to have coding skills, all you need is a little bit of help and confidence and that's something that we offer, is a foot through the door to feel like actually this isn't so difficult, it's actually quite easy. I now know the people, I’ve got access or I understand how the hardware works and now I can figure out how to actually make a film or create a company and a lot of individuals after attending have done that successfully.

Neil Milliken: And I would like -- that's fantastic. I would like some others to jump in here. Andreas, what are some of the ways you've engaged people with disabilities in your development?

Andreas Forsland: Thanks for asking that question. I think, you know, accessibility inclusion has been a topic for a long time, and it's always sort of gotten lip service, it's sort of lived in HR and compliance, but to the point that Christopher  - Oh, sorry, Andreas Forsland speaking - the points that Christopher and Nina are making are so true, we're at this inflection point companies need to stop talking about it and doing it. You know? You have to walk the talk. Actually build it into your cascading KPIS, key performance indicators, and your metrics that you hold departments accountable for within companies. One example is Apple. Apple, they just announced they're going to be putting part of the executive teams' bonuses on the line, tied to accessibility initiatives, right. As you start to add more teeth into the organization and more conviction for a diverse culture, you're going to start to see much more transformation which I’m excited about this topic in particular. What we're doing at Cognixion is from the very beginning, we have co-designed and hired individuals with disabilities or family members with disabilities into the team, so our company currently is about 16 people, but what we've done is built an advisory council around our team of over 120 people with disabilities. We have almost 10x more people in the community that we're working with than we have staff in the company. So we have individuals in our development team who have physical disabilities or represent neuro or gender diverse profiles and we are heavily influenced by having a fairly balanced ratio in our hiring practices. One example 66% of our engineers are female. We intend to continue to have a diverse hiring strategy within the organization. Beyond that the work we're doing --

Neil Milliken: Go ahead. We are running a little behind time, so -- but that's a great example.

Andreas Forsland: Our point is like walk the talk and don't put lip service to it. You want to make a sustainable impact and put it into practice.  

Neil Milliken: Sorry. Neil, again, sorry, Andreas, for calling you Josh. Josh, over to you.  
 
Josh Christianson: Thank you. Well, you know, I wish Neil wasn't just the moderator but a panelist and you could talk about apprenticeships and accessible technology you've been successful utilizing in the UK. Part of my goal in getting people with disabilities involved in immersive technology, not part of, one goal would be to have an accessibility occupation under the registered apprenticeship rubric of Department of Labor and we're going to keep working on that so that more people understand accessibility and we would definitely be targeting people with disabilities to participate. I also don't think there will be this one specific to the XR world, not my strong point, so I hope I’m wrong and someone can correct me, or I hope someone would get in touch with me and I can help them design and develop that, but, you know, we are working specifically around apprenticeships related to technology and the skill sets utilized by people that make emerging technologies. And again, our focus is on making those inclusive from the marketing, recruiting to all the protocols. Apprenticeships have a couple of components to them, they have related instruction sometimes, before the placement, there's a mentorship component and then the job placement on the job training, and just really infusing inclusion and awareness around disability through all of that is our goal. So, you know, we work with various intermediaries that might sit in between the talent and the company - I'll plug apprenti, apprenticareers.org, and they're getting occupation from, you know, cloud specialists, operations, devops, to basic programming and developer. So, you know, we're working hard to make sure -- working with a lot of populations that people are speaking to, but also making huge efforts to include people with disabilities and so that's exciting to see. I know we're short on time. I would just close by saying I think apprenticeship really is an amazing tool for any company to utilize, whether you set it up by yourself or go through an intermediary and anybody that's interested in that I would encourage them to reach out to us at the Partnership on Inclusive Apprenticeship even if it's not specific to disability and other populations I would be happy to steer you in the right directions to make the whole sector more inclusive and welcoming of people.

Neil Milliken: 100% echo that. It's Neil again. Apprenticeships have been amazing for our organization. We've benefitted greatly. To echo some of the things being said by the panel so far, you know, we want to create organizations that create tech that are reflective of the makeup of society because then we get tech that respects society and everything else. Apprenticeships are a great way of getting that talent and breaking down those biases that people have, even if they're unconscious, about how capable people are from different diverse groups. So we could talk about this for hours, but I think we would be really interested in looking at how the XR initiative could leverage the approaches that you've outlined already, to increase the involvement of people with disabilities and people from different backgrounds. Perhaps, Christopher, you could start.

Christopher Lafayette: Sure. The best way that we're tackling that is that we don't want to do initiatives for communities, we want to bring these communities to do these initiatives. There's such a difference when an organization that's doing something for people, or you're doing things with people, as the actual people, as someone that has come into this world, as part of the disabled community, someone that is coming into this world, someone asked me a long time ago on stage years ago, Chris, when was the first time that you got into diversity inclusion and equity and belonging? And I had to think for a second and said I was born into it. I was born into it. This isn't something for us to get into. This is how we are, who we live, and it's for far too long there's been such a gap between companies and corporations that want to do for these communities and I would submit to you I have created a platform with 100% -- almost 100% female led, from C-suite down, women-led organization and we've created an organization and a company that actually hires the people in whom we are looking to serve. At the same time getting relationships not from executive C-suite, but getting engineers that work at these companies and corporations and designers and artists and people from Unity, and Unreal, and all the rad things they're doing at Epic, getting them to be part of this. We launched an initiative that's going viral right now called Her Innovation which is a wonderful platform not just creating social initiative and social impact standards for female entrepreneurial development but actually getting them them on an honest and a real level, and that program was built by the women leadership that we have on our team. For years I’ve been hearing how we could do so much better and I’ve been taking notes how me as a man and black man can listen more to other communities that I could benefit from listening and I have been one of those people that have benefitted from listening. Here's the thing, all of us sitting here we have wonderful ideas and wonderful ways to be able to contribute to our communities and execute but many of us have these walls now that are so, almost insurmountable, saying how do we pay for the right type of deal flow to be able to get the necessary capital to fuel these wonderful ideas that companies have so much solidarity for when it comes to our black communities and making their Instagram pages black and saying we're with you and marketing opportunities. I'll believe it that you say that you're with me when I see people that look like me that are with you. And right now, I extend an opportunity, Neil, I extend an opportunity, I’m not asking for a handout but extend an opportunity for companies such as Verizon Media, Cornell Tech, PEAT, the work that Samantha Soloway is doing and that Bill Curtis-Davidson is doing, make these communities wholistic and real by actually being a product of that experience and living it and not just talking about it. Again I say, we're heading into immersive simulated environments, hyper realistic, immersive simulated environments when it comes to XR and ways that we-

Neil Milliken: Absolutely. Christopher, I can feel your passion, but we're running over time. So sorry about this. We can talk for hours for sure. Andreas, likewise, I know you're passionate. How are we going to leverage this disability minority led innovation through the initiatives you're doing? How can we be the next thing that brings people together?

Andreas Forsland: Well, you know, I just echo what Chris is saying, it's designing for people and with people but it's actually giving people the tools to design in your organization. So I think, you know, if you're going to be building systems on Unreal or Unity or other platforms, Niantic or others, you need to make sure those environments have templated tools to take advantage of best practices for accessibility, right. Start at the platform development layer and give the tools and plug-ins to people who need to develop the tools for themselves and for their community, right. Let's start as a platform and the development environment and make sure that they're accessible and they have tools to provide accessible features that can be deployed out universally. I think that's an area to start. You know, training individuals on those tools and then raising awareness for not only the goodwill and the social reasoning and the passionate reasonings for an inclusive world but there's also a point to be made which has to do with kind of the cynical aspects of business, which has to do with real business, the economics of an inclusive world, is there's an abundance of money, there's an abundance of gross domestic product that is just sitting on the sidelines waiting to be deployed through unlocking creativity of this extremely neurodiverse community. There's literally a billion people with disabilities and, you know, it's a large portion of individuals who can't even get in to use the technology, but they have cognitive abilities and creative capability to express themselves in a variety of ways. I think let's start with tool building, with training, and building best practices around things like low vision access, hearing access, speech access, thinking about cognitive and behavioral access tools, thinking about motor augmentation and those are areas that I think are super important and really thinking about right now this inflection point, I did a keynote last week on 100 year view, 50 years kind of looking backwards and 50 years looking forwards, and right now, 2020, we're at this inflection point where if you go back in time, accessible like indirect or alternative access methods has always been kind of the secondary way to access technology because it was always an interface that was dependent on using your hands to turn knobs or rabbit ears or move sliders or click buttons. We're moving into a realm there's going to be more sensors than you've dreamed on your mobile phone and AR mixed reality environments. We're at this technological inflection point where we're going to get into sensors as the user interface, which means it's the first time in history where if we design XR right we can take advantage of sensors to where people with diverse access needs become your power users first. Like the next 50 years are going to be around designing for accessibility and letting everyone else in the main stream benefit from that. Think about taking a universal design approach and the moment is now to see that sort of curve switch towards a more sensor based experience.

Neil Milliken: That's super interesting. And last up, but not by no means least Nina. You're on mute.

Nina Salomons: First of all, I would like to say that this is so inspiring and everything that XR Access is doing as well as what Andreas and Christopher and Josh are doing is so inspiring. I really hope that XR Access can work together with all the partners and potentially, I don't know, create a pipeline where it's, you know, teaching, educating, apprenticeship and maybe jobs, running regular accessibility sprints for research and design with other companies, trying to figure out a way to pay developers to build plug-ins that are successful and benefit the community. In terms of what XRDI is doing we've created a free resources sheet, which is  available on our website and if you are looking to support diversity and everything that XRDI is doing, please feel free to contact me. If you're interested in specific workshops feel free to contact me. I really, really am very excited about everything that's being said today and I really look forward to seeing what everybody else will do in the future.  
 
Neil Milliken: Wonderful. This is Neil. I want to thank Andreas, Christopher, Josh and Nina for the valuable perspective and your clear passion for this. I’m equally passionate and clearly half an hour is not enough to cover these topics. We owe the audience the opportunity to ask us some questions. So I would really, you know, like to open up the floor and hand over to Jesse for Q&A.

Jessie Taft: Great. Thank you so much, Neil, Josh, Nina, Christopher and Andreas for that fantastic discussion. It was really so inspiring to learn from all of you. For the audience as a reminder post questions to the panelists in the topic-business channel on slack. I’m going to start with a question that combines what Corinne and Bill asked, which is, from Bill, what does the K-12 and university student pipeline look like for accessible XR and From Corinne, how can we bridge the gap for students with disabilities entering the workforce because they sort of lose that student support as they graduate? If anybody would like to take that.

Christopher Lafayette:  Josh, do you want to go? So we've -- to answer -- I think those are fantastic questions. I’ll keep it brief. We've become more virtual in the past year than we have the past ten. And we now are using communication tools that have been available to us but in ways we never have before. Within our Black Technology Mentorship Program we have 250 educational modules that we're building, we're building 250 more by year's end. To reach out to our specific K through 10 and K through 12 community members because it's so important to make sure they understand where it is that they're heading into this new virtual world. Can you imagine being in K through 12 heading into this pandemic world that we're heading -- that they're heading into? There was a time when we were coming out into the workforce and this new world at such a different way but it's completely converting virtual and this is why I continue to say that we cannot let curriculum and education be their guide. It takes mentorship reimagined to help get our younger generations and communities into this new world that we now find ourselves in.

Neil Milliken: Thank you, Christopher. I would like to echo the -- this is Neil again. I'd like to echo the fact that traditional education is just unfit for the world that we're now living in and that we need a technology immersive and inclusive approach to helping people learn and acquire knowledge in a way that meets their needs, their needs and the employer's needs so they have the right skills to meet the jobs of tomorrow and the capabilities to continue that learning because actually one of the things that really has changed over the last period of time is the requirement to constantly learn and constantly reacquire new tech skills. The education system hasn't been capable of delivering that and we have an opportunity to broaden the opportunities for everyone by creating new ways of teaching.  

Jessie Taft: Great. Thank you. So in the interest of time I’m going to combine another two questions. So Myles on slack asks do any of the panelists have experiences they would like to share regarding the intersectionality of disability with race or gender and building on that with Dylan's question to what extent do you think that creating these opportunities and creating accessible technologies is an issue of social justice? I’m going to hand this to Neil and maybe you can address it or assign someone else.

Neil Milliken: Sure. I only -- I’m not intersectional. I have hidden disabilities and I am absolutely passionate about it being a social justice issue. Maybe some of the other panelists can talk about intersectionality better than I am because I’m the intersection of disability and white male privilege. Go on. You look like you're ready to say something. Please.

Andreas Forsland: Well, you know, this -- it's a thorny topic, right, and kind of like it's a bold statement to say anything is a human right, you know. It takes some sort of, you know -- the commons come together to define and turn something from an idea into a fact as everyone agrees but in our case in Cognixion, this is Andreas speaking, we're focused on supporting individuals who have trouble communicating, right, and for us, that is a bold statement that we believe that communication is, in fact, a human right, it's a part of the human condition and it's everything. Everything in life is dependent on expressing yourself and being understood. So fundamentally we believe that social justices and communication is intertwined and communication access has to be prioritized and we're starting to see areas where you're talking about this intersection  and some of the intersections we see which are, you know, economic positions so we have individuals who are economically vulnerable socioeconomically vulnerable because of a disability, need to have methods of funding access to technology, so we're benefitting from the work that has changed like policy has changed due to a number of influential factors that has led to laws being created where Medicare and Medicaid and private insurance now covers the costs of speech-generating devices and other things like this, so as we start to see -- we just have to be mindful of the out-of-pocket expense and the overhead of assistive technologies and accessible technologies. The more the platform companies that wield tremendous international power take seriously, accessibility, to where they can invest and scale out access to billions of people as opposed to putting the dependencies on medical insurance funding and public sector out of taxes to pay for that where the digital platforms should be focusing much more and taking it seriously I think. And the economic checks and balances that are associated with that. It's not just individuals with communication disabilities. I mean across the board we have seniors, right, so we have a huge trend that's emerging now, that's having to do all the way back to the baby boomers, but we're having lower and lower birth rates, and so we have this aging population with a vacuum behind the aging population called the sandwich generation that's going to be taxed with care giving and you have this caregiving tsunami that's about to hit over the next 10 to 20 years coupled with the lack of technology that's really in place to help empower caregivers and teachers and clinical professionals whether you're old or have a disability at a young age so I think it's a call to action right now where we need to think about the future, the accessible world and how we can actually push more of the funding and the economics out of government and into industry to help subsidize and invest in those innovations.

Christopher Lafayette: Yeah. Neil, I think when we talk about intersectionality I think about Kimberlé Crenshaw, and how most people really don't understand the magnitude of what that actual term means. I really enjoy what Andreas said and I’ll say this, in my closing words, if you will, is that look, here's the situation, if we had more equity, inclusion, belonging, and sustainability incorporated into XR technology which we desperately need, I would submit to you and you have companies that are willing, wanting to do more, somebody mentioned Apple, some say Apple is valued as a $2 trillion company aren't they doing that well or fine and I would submit that I believe that Apple, who I love, would be valued as a 8 to $10 trillion company had they embraced this type of initiative when it comes to social justice, this is a social justice issue and we have to stop looking at this as a feel good initiative but these initiatives are revenue drivers and if you do not have this type of material woven into the fabric of your ecosystem our foundation will fail. So it's not a feel good initiative. It is a foundational development and necessity that we hire people with accessible demand and need and inclusion. It's a must. We cannot succeed until we do that.

Neil Milliken: Absolutely. We've got a tsunami of aging and acquired disabilities and we must make sure that the people we employ and keep employed and keep economically viable and engaged represents the whole of society not just the subsets. I don't know how we are for time? Are we all right? Did Nina want to comment or we have to close now?

Jessie Taft: Unfortunately we are out of time. Thank you so much all of you, Neil, Josh, Nina, Christopher, and Andreas. It's been so great learning from all of you on this. I’m going to pass it up to Dylan to wrap up our event for the day.