Perkins School for the Blind Teams with MIT to Host Hackathon: The Super Bowl of Accessibility
By Maya Shwayder | 24 hours ago
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A team working on ideas to adapt technology for those with disabilities at #HackDisability: AI for Accessibility Hackathon hosted by MIT and Perkins School for the Blind. (Courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind)
CAMBRIDGE — On any given Friday night at MIT there’s bound to be a few stragglers hanging around the Strata Center, the architecturally world-famous building in Cambridge that houses the MIT Computer and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
On Friday Feb. 23, there were more than a few folks about, and not just from MIT: people from Perkins School for the Blind, Amazon, the Museum of Science, Cisco, and even a representative from the White House gathered for Perkins’ “#HackDisability: AI for Accessibility Hackathon,” the Watertown-based school’s second-ever hackathon and the first focused specially on harnessing artificial intelligence for a group that is often left behind by technology.
The task was seemingly simple. A few dozen participants from MIT and surrounding colleges all volunteered to spend their week working in small teams and putting together new [...]