Hope Tech is on Forbes 30
We’re thrilled to share some exciting news: Hope Tech has been named in the 2025 Forbes Under 30 Europe list for Social Impact!
Brian Mwenda and Laura Wissiak posing for a photo which is framed with “Forbes under 30 Europe 2025”. Brian has a Sixth Sense wearable on his shoulders and Laura has one hand up showing an international sign language ILY.
When I first met Brian, he told me about his motivation behind becoming a serial founder: In Nairobi, he attended an integrated school, and when it was time to move on to University after graduation, some of his friends suddenly found themselves severely limited in their choices of which degrees they could pursue, simply because of the lack of accessible study materials. For example, pupils using a screen reader would have a hard time reading mathematical formulas with it.
That triggered him to go into engineering. The technology already exists; why aren’t we using it to facilitate access to education, work opportunities, and mobility for people with disabilities?
And that hit home for me, too. I had been working as a UX designer at the time, not officially specializing in accessibility, but definitely spamming everyone I worked with about the upcoming changes in the WCAG 2.2 release. Making the products I worked on accessible to the best of my (at the time still very limited) competencies seemed to be more of a responsibility of the role than a fun side project.
Joining forces with Brian and Hope Tech seemed risky. Again, I was good at research and empathy, not business. But the temptation of going into the field, and learning about access requirements, user expectations, and access barriers directly from the people who use assistive technology daily, made me take this leap of faith.
And now, we are here and owe Brian a collective “Thank You” for casually suggesting I start a blog to share Hope Tech’s user research findings. The first entry was, of course, my ever-beloved Trashcan Post.
Story of Hope Tech
Speaking of Hope Tech’s user research: The goal of it all is to develop assistive tech that people actually want to use. I will be honest: For a while, I was afraid we may be developing a disability dongle instead.
“What’s a Disability Dongle?” I don’t hear you asking, but I assume some of you are thinking. A disability dongle is a non-disabled solution to a problem that isn’t really a problem for the disabled community. Instead of fixing a real problem, it makes one up for the purpose of fixing it.
User-Led Development
To avoid that, we doubled down on the community input and held user tests at every stage of the development. And to air out a dirty little secret: We received our fair share of hard feedback. It’s not easy-breezy to overhaul your entire product design after each iteration. But I would argue that it was harder to push through the ego death and reassess our own biases. Everyone holds some and needs to actively unlearn them.
We work closely with interest groups and Disabled People’s Organizations to make sure we build something that people will actually want to use.
Feedback ranged far and wide:
If the product augments the white cane, look into how people learn to use the white cane for your onboarding journey.
Consider the aesthetics: “I may be blind, but I still want to look good!”
Size matters: Heavy wearables are uncomfortable.
But wait, what about the packaging?
We continue our quest for feedback and are now looking for interested individuals for the beta testing phase.
From Offline to Online to Advocacy
We started Hope Tech insights in Austria to extend our work beyond product development to advocacy, education, and community building. That’s why you see Hope Tech at developer and UX conferences despite us being a hardware developer at heart!
Web accessibility has been my special interest from the dawn of my UX journey. Nowadays, I teach a web accessibility lecture at the international coding BootCamp UpLeveled, publish in-depth articles for Accessibility First, and speak at UX and Developer events, including the Google Developer Group Vienna.
Brian started Hope Tech back in 2016 with the vision to employ technology as a bridge to fill the access gap in infrastructure and education. Almost a decade later, we still operate on the same fundamental value: Accessibility is not a business service; it’s a fundamental right. By now, the Kenyan branch has grown to include the Hope Tech Foundation as well, to distribute more assistive tech devices in the local community.
Our products may serve our customers, but our learnings can serve many more. Yet knowledge-sharing alone isn’t the solution. And for the same reason, I started volunteering with Access Austria to check acoustic traffic lights for malfunctions every other month. Product development takes time, but this is an immediate improvement for safer navigation. Not only for paying customers but for all in my local community.
A sustainable shift towards real inclusion requires change in policy, values, and attitudes.
