Publications
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Liberia National Priority Assistive Products List (APL)
Clinton Health Access Initiative, Ministry of Health, LiberiaJuly 27, 2026LiberiaAcademic Research PublicationsLiberia’s first National Priority Assistive Products List (APL) is evidence of the Government of Liberia’s commitment to increasing access to assistive technology (AT) through strengthening governance and coordination in the sector. The APL is intended to guide the AT sector in procurement, donation, service provider training, development of technical standards and service delivery guidelines, and broader advocacy and resource mobilisation efforts. T
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Seeing Clearly: The Impact of Affordable Eyeglasses on Daily Life in Kenya
Global Disability Innovation Hub, Dot Glasses, Senses HubJuly 8, 2026KenyaCase Studies and ReportsThe report draws on survey, questionnaire, and interview data from people who received eyeglasses through the trial. Participants reported meaningful improvements in daily activities such as reading, phone use, schoolwork, and mobility, alongside increased independence and confidence. Experiences were not uniform: some participants reported discomfort or more modest benefits, and a small minority reported no improvement or reduced independence
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Seeing Clearly: The Impact of Affordable Eyeglasses on Daily Life in Kenya
Dot GlassesJuly 8, 2026KenyaAT2030 ResourcesThe report draws on survey, questionnaire, and interview data from people who received eyeglasses through the trial. Participants reported meaningful improvements in daily activities such as reading, phone use, schoolwork, and mobility, alongside increased independence and confidence. Experiences were not uniform: some participants reported discomfort or more modest benefits, and a small minority reported no improvement or reduced independence
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A Critical Review of Sexuality, Technology and Disability
Patel Dilisha, Ekat Osipova, Dr Giulia Barbareschi, Katta SpielJuly 8, 2026GlobalAcademic Research PublicationsThe investigation of technologies facilitating sexual interactions and sexuality-related explorations is becoming more established in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), albeit with little systematic attention to the sexual lives of disabled people. In this space, we undertook a literature review utilising feminist content analysis to take stock and critically analyse the domains of sexuality, technology and disability when they intersect. Our approach aligns with the broader goals of promoting inclusivity, diversity, and equity in technology design and application. We present a descriptive and analytical outline of existing research on sexuality, technology and disability through which we identified unmarked norms governing research.
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Dot Glasses Field Trial Template Pack
Dot GlassesJuly 8, 2026KenyaAT2030 ResourcesDot Glasses Field Trial Template Pack
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Simplified Refraction Eyewear for Low Resource Settings Field Trial Toolkit - DOT Glasses
Dot GlassesJuly 8, 2026KenyaCase Studies and ReportsThis toolkit is a practical guide for delivering simplified refraction eyewear in low-resource settings. It draws on a field trial conducted across seven community sites in Nairobi and Kiambu Counties in June August 2025. It is designed to help teams: • deliver vision camps safely and efficiently • maintain protocol and data quality • generate evidence that supports real decisions about scale. This toolkit focuses on how to deliver. It covers field operations, ethics and safeguarding, monitoring, and partner roles, based on what worked in practice.
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Simplified Refraction Eyewear for Low Resource Settings Field Trial Toolkit - DOT Glasses
Global Disability Innovation Hub, Dot Glasses, Senses HubJune 25, 2026KenyaCase Studies and ReportsThis toolkit is a practical guide for delivering simplified refraction eyewear in low-resource settings. It draws on a field trial conducted across seven community sites in Nairobi and Kiambu Counties from June to August 2025. It is designed to help teams: • deliver vision camps safely and efficiently • maintain protocol and data quality • generate evidence that supports real decisions about scale. This toolkit focuses on how to deliver. It covers field operations, ethics and safeguarding, monitoring, and partner roles, based on what worked in practice.
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Inclusive Climate Infrastructure Design Playbook
Global Disability Innovation HubJune 23, 2026GlobalAT2030 ResourcesInclusive climate infrastructure design is an approach to co-designing physical spaces, services, and systems that anticipate, prepare for, and adapt to changing climate conditions while simultaneously enabling accessibility and equal participation for all people, particularly people with disabilities. Such infrastructure can prevent, absorb, recover from, and adapt to disruptions caused by current and future climate risks while strengthening the resilience capacity of people with disabilities.
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Disseminating the Country-Level Strategy on Strengthening Organisations of Persons with Disabilities through Assistive Technology in Kenya.
Global Disability Innovation Hub, Kilimanjaro Blind TrustJune 23, 2026AT2030 ResourcesKilimanjaro Blind Trust Africa (KBTA), through the AT2030 Programme led by the Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub), organised a national dissemination event to present the Country-Level Strategy on Strengthening Organisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) through Assistive Technology in Kenya. KBTA developed the strategy following a comprehensive needs assessment conducted in Nairobi, Kisumu, and Mombasa Counties and consultations with OPDs, government institutions, development partners, researchers, and Assistive Technology stakeholders.
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Project Euphonia: advancing inclusive speech recognition through expanded data collection and evaluation
Centre for Digital Language InclusionJune 20, 2026GlobalAcademic Research PublicationsSpeech recognition models, predominantly trained on standard speech, often exhibit lower accuracy for individuals with accents, dialects, or speech impairments. This disparity is particularly pronounced for economically or socially marginalized communities, including those with disabilities or diverse linguistic backgrounds. Project Euphonia, a Google initiative originally launched in English dedicated to improving Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) of disordered speech, is expanding its data collection and evaluation efforts to include international languages like Spanish, Japanese, French and Hindi, in a continued effort to enhance inclusivity. This paper presents an overview of the extension of processes and methods used for English data collection to more languages and locales, progress on the collected data, and details about our model evaluation process, focusing on meaning preservation based on Generative AI.
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A review of assistive product prices in 12 countries
Johan Borg, Irene Calvo, Vinicius Delgado RamosApril 29, 2026GlobalAcademic Research PublicationsThe World Health Organization (WHO) and the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) estimate that over 2.5 billion people need assistive technology, yet access remains limited. In response to this pressing need, WHO has maintained, since 2016, a Priority Assistive Products List (APL) with 50 priority assistive products. In 2024, an update was launched to revise and expand the list based on new evidence and stakeholder input. This paper presents the price review component of the update. The review consisted of collecting global price data and classifying assistive products into price ranges to support the decision-making process for the updated APL.
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Building Common Ground from the Ground Up: Repair Infrastructure for Human–Agent Collaboration in African Languages
Gifty Ayoka, Vicki Austin, Catherine Holloway, Dr Giulia Barbareschi, Katrin Angerbauer, Richard CaveApril 13, 2026Academic Research PublicationsTheories of distributed teamwork portraying LLMs as remote collaborators are frequently constructed around an unexamined assumption: that collaborators share a natural language. For speakers of the vast majority of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages, this assumption does not hold—the LLM agents are not merely remote but functionally non-communicative as they do not share the languages of the users they supposedly collaborate with. Drawing on three years of work through the Centre for Digital Language Inclusion (CDLI), which has scaled community-driven speech recognition from one to thirteen African languages, we argue that linguistic asymmetry is the defining yet overlooked barrier to human–agent collaboration for the majority world.
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Beyond the Manual: Mapping Peer-Generated Content about Wheelchair Care and Adaptation on YouTube
Wen Mo, Catherine Holloway, Lan Xiao, Aneesha SinghApril 13, 2026GlobalAcademic Research PublicationsWheelchair users often face significant barriers to maintaining and adapting their chairs, from resource constraints to limited access to professional services. In response, many turn to social media platforms such as YouTube to share and learn practical knowledge. However, little is known about how wheelchair users document and exchange repair, maintenance, and customization practices online. To address this gap, we analyzed 290 YouTube videos alongside 800 sampled comments using thematic coding and statistical analysis.
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Mobile as Assistive Technology Kenya Case Study Report
Global Disability Innovation HubMarch 31, 2026KenyaCase Studies and ReportsMobile phones are increasingly important to our lives. They can connect people to learning and employment opportunities and support social and cultural interactions. Mobile phones have also been identified as assistive technology in prior AT2030 research. However, mobile phones and the Internet are often excluded from Government or Insurance-based assistive technology provision schemes in low- and middle-income countries. There is insufficient evidence to explain how mobile phones function as assistive technologies and what support is needed for people to learn the full suite of accessibility features on mobile devices.
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Pathways to Funding For Organisations of Persons with Disabilities in Low- and-Middle-Income Countries
Global Disability Innovation Hub, Rebecca Joskow, Anna Landre, Pollyanna WardropMarch 31, 2026GlobalAcademic Research PublicationsOrganisations of Persons with Disabilities (OPDs) play vital roles as policy and governance experts, strategic partners, advocates, and community implementers of work to progress equity and inclusion of people with disabilities, including accelerating access to assistive technology. Despite their integral role in disability rights advocacy, many OPDs operate with minimal and insecure funding, undermining their ability to sustain operations, be involved in, and have influence over the shaping of strategies, policies, and interventions.
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Mobile as Assistive Technology India Case Study Report
Global Disability Innovation HubMarch 31, 2026IndiaAcademic Research PublicationsThis summary presents findings from a 12-month research study conducted by the Centre for Accessibility in the Global South (CAGS) at IIIT Bangalore, in partnership with the Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub) at University College London. The study examined the potential of Android smartphones to function as assistive technology (AT) for people with visual and hearing impairments in India.
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Mobile as Assistive Technology Brazil Case Study Report
Global Disability Innovation HubMarch 31, 2026BrazilAcademic Research PublicationsThis study investigated the feasibility and impact of providing smartphones and digital skills training to people with visual and hearing impairments in Brazil, a country where over 84% of the population uses the internet, but a significant digital divide persists for those with disabilities.
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2026 Advance awardees
Royal Academy of EngineeringMarch 31, 2026GlobalCase Studies and ReportsAdvance 2026 will work towards the theme of 'Accessibility, Assistive and Inclusive Technologies’ during the 2025 to 2026 period. Advance 2026 is a collaboration between the Royal Academy of Engineering and Global Disability Innovation Hub, part of the AT2030 programme, which is funded by UK International Development.
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AT2030: Para Sport Against Stigma Learning from Systems, Storytelling and Assistive Technology
Global Disability Innovation HubMarch 31, 2026Malawi, United KingdomCase Studies and ReportsThe AT2030 Para Sport Against Stigma Programme is a multi-phase research and practice initiative funded by UK International Development and led by Loughborough University in partnership with organisations across Southern Africa. It explored how Para Sport, media, storytelling, and assistive technology could work together to challenge disability stigma and evolved through cycles of reflection and learning shifting from an early focus on broadcast access and Paralympic visibility toward a deeper understanding of how stigma is structurally reproduced through systems, and what it actually takes to enable participation.
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Global Insights Summary report
Global Disability Innovation HubMarch 31, 2026GlobalAcademic Research PublicationsSmartphones now contain screen readers, magnification tools, live captions, real-time transcription, and navigation features that can perform many of the functions of traditional assistive products. Across low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), people with disabilities are using these built-in features as their primary assistive technology, often because specialist AT is unavailable, unaffordable, or absent.
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