ATU774 – Glint with Dylan Makani

Hi, this is Dylan Makani, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Ner Chat, and this is your Assistive Technology Update.

Hello, and welcome to your Assistive Technology Update, a weekly dose of information that keeps you up to date on the latest developments in the field of technology designed to assist individuals with disabilities and special needs. I’m your host Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 774 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on March 27th, 2026.

On today’s show, we’re joined by Dylan, co-founder and CEO of Ner Chat, and he’s here to tell us all about Glint and how it’s able to help individuals with creating visuals for learning, communication and many other needs. We’ll also have a quick story about folks using extended reality out in North Dakota to help individuals with disabilities explore manufacturing jobs, a visit from our friends at BridgingApps with An App Worth Mentioning, and we’ve got a personalized invite to each and every one of you to join us here at Easterseals Crossroads in our INDATA Project for AT Awareness Day coming up in April.

As always, listeners, we thank you so much for taking time out of your day to give us a listen. And if you’ve got a little more time, drop us a line. You can give us a call at 317-721-7124, or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org. You got a suggestion for someone we should have on the show? Maybe there’s something you want to learn a little bit more about? Questions, comments, we take it all, folks. So don’t forget, if you do want to reach us, just give us a call at 317-721-7124, or send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org.

Also, listeners, if you’re looking for a transcript of today’s show, it’s available over at eastersealstech.com. Our transcripts are generously sponsored by INTRAC and you can find out more about INTRAC at indianarelay.com. Also, if you haven’t, be sure to check out our show now on YouTube. Just go to YouTube or YouTube Music and search for Assistive Technology Update, you can find our show there as well. But for right now, let’s go ahead and get on with the show.

If you happen to have questions about assistive technology, we have Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions, or ATFAQ. The show is hosted by Brian Norton and features yours truly, along with Belva Smith, as we all talk about assistive technology with questions that come in from email, phone calls and other means. We also don’t always know the answer, so it’s very important that we have listeners that can help us out with some of those questions because while we like to think every once in a while that we may know everything, we’re proven wrong almost daily on that one. So if you’re looking for more podcast to listen to or if you have questions about assistive technology, make sure to check out Assistive Technology Frequently Asked Questions wherever you get your podcasts.

On April 22nd, 2026, Easterseals Crossroads is opening its doors and its Zoom room for a truly special celebration, Assistive Technology Awareness Day, and we want you to be a part of it. This year, INDATA, Atlas and our clinical assistive technology department are joining forces to highlight the incredible impact of assistive technology and the dedicated professionals who help individuals with disabilities access life-changing tools every day. Whether you’re a longtime AT user, a professional in the field, a caregiver or just someone curious about how technology can transform independence, this is an event you won’t want to miss. Assistive technology is so much more than devices and gadgets, it’s about possibility. It’s about giving people new ways to communicate, connect, learn, work and participate in everyday life. It’s about opening doors that might otherwise stay closed. And on AT Awareness Day, you’ll get an inside look at the innovations and the people that make all of that happen.

During our celebration, you’ll have the opportunity to tour our programs, meet the teams behind the technology and get hands-on with a wide range of AT tools and devices. You’ll see communication devices, smart home solutions, mobility supports, computer access tools, environmental controls, workplace accommodations, accessible gaming devices and so much more, each one designed to remove barriers and help individuals live more independent lives.

And the best part? You can join us in the way that works best for you. Our in-person event will be held Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM at Easterseals Crossroads in Indianapolis, Indiana. You can walk through our buildings, ask questions, explore devices firsthand and meet the specialists who change lives every day. We’ll be guiding attendees through our programs and demonstrations so you get a complete real-world look at how AT is used, evaluated and delivered. If you’re not able to make it in-person, no problem. We’re hosting a live Zoom tour you can join from anywhere. You’ll still get a behind the scenes look at our At labs, demonstration areas and services, all guided by members of our AT team who will walk you through the tools, answer questions and give you a front row seat to the work we do. Our virtual event will happen Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026 from 10:00 AM to 11:00 AM. The Zoom link and more information is available at eastersealstech.com/atawarenessday2026. There’s also a link in the show notes.

Why do we celebrate AT Awareness Day? Well, National Assistive Technology Awareness Day is recognized across the country as a time to highlight the importance of assistive technology and the transformative role it plays for millions of people with disabilities and older adults. AT Awareness Day is more than a calendar observance, it’s a recognition of the fact that assistive technology is not a luxury, it’s a necessity. These tools support learning, communication, employment, safety and communicate participation. They’re essential for independence, dignity and access. But this day also honors the professionals in the field of assistive technology, the specialists, program coordinators, researchers, technicians and advocates who work tirelessly to help people get the right tools for their needs. Their dedication ensures that individuals are never alone in navigating the world of assistive technology. That there’s always someone ready to help, teach, build, adjust and support as needed.

So please join us on Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026 to celebrate National AT Awareness Day here at Easterseals Crossroads or online. More information, including links to the remote session, are available at eastersealstech.com/atawarenessday2026 or down in the show notes. Can’t wait to see you there.

Listeners, our first story comes to us from KFGO.com, it’s by Paul Jurgens and it’s titled Virtual Reality Makes Manufacturing More Accessible for People with Disabilities. The story is out of Bismarck, North Dakota. It talks about a new virtual reality room at Bismarck State College. It’s made to assist individuals with different disabilities get jobs in manufacturing. The project is called XR for VR, which stands for Extended Reality for Vocational Rehabilitation. This is a collaboration between the Fargo virtual reality media company called Be More Colorful, Bismarck State College, ND Assistive, which is the AT Act provider out in North Dakota, as well as CAST, who we’ve had them on the show before with cast.org.

Really, the whole goal of the thing is to really help individuals with disabilities maybe think about manufacturing jobs and make them a little bit more inclusive for folks. It gives individuals the chance to use virtual reality tech to view a manufacturing facility, maybe learn safety protocols and some other task or skills that might be needed on the job, but in a controlled environment. In a place where you can really control everything and not have to worry about actually being out on the manufacturing floor or some place where there may be something dangerous, or perilous, or other things that may need dodged when you’re actually out there on the job.

Be More Colorful co-founder Matthew Chaussee says, “We’ve seen talented, capable people steering towards jobs far below their capabilities, earning much less than a living wage often due to incorrect assumptions about perceived limitations.” So this gives individuals with disabilities a chance to really try out something maybe they wouldn’t have thought of as a job goal or as something to be able to do and really work towards.

He says on down here that, “While participants can use the program with virtual reality headsets, XR for VR hopes to open nine virtual reality rooms.” So basically, these would project the workspaces on the walls and floor and not require a headset, which could be even more inclusive for individuals who maybe have challenges wearing the headset or just aren’t able to access things that way.

So I’ll put a link to this over in the show notes so that you can go check it out yourself, but I haven’t heard about one of these for a while. I know for a minute, there were some of these out there, but I love that they’re really doing it with actual manufacturing sites so that you can use the virtual reality, the extended reality in order to see exactly what it would be like there on the floor of a manufacturing facility. So I really love this because it does open up doors for individuals, depending on the disability. It can take away some of the anxiety and some of the worry just by letting you know what you’re really getting into, what the situation’s going to be like and it just provides a very safe environment to train skills, to find out if it’s something that even interests somebody to end up pursuing and really can just make a great training environment. So again, we’ll put a link to this over in the show notes so that you can go and check it out for yourself.

Listeners, next up on the show, we’re very excited to welcome back Ale Gonzalez from BridgingApps with An App Worth Mentioning.

This is Ale Gonzalez with BridgingApps and this is An App Worth Mentioning. This week’s featured app is called Eva. Eva is a home management app that helps you organize your whole home and life in one place by letting you store task, reminders, events, list, calendars, contacts and documents all together. It turns voice or text brain dumps into organized plans so you don’t forget things and can easily find what you need. The app is easy to use with voice instructions and large buttons that help people who have trouble reading or using small text.

For people with disabilities, Eva can reduce stress by keeping important information in one easy to find place. This is especially helpful for people with memory challenges, ADHD or executive functioning difficulties. By turning thoughts into clear tasks and reminders, Eva supports independence and helps users feel more in control of their daily routines. Eva is currently available for iOS devices and is free to download with a 14-day free trial. For more information on this app and others like it, visit www.bridgingapps.org.

Listeners, today we are excited to welcome Dylan Makani from Ner Chat to the show to talk about Glint and how it can assist educators and learners, and we’re excited to learn all about it.

Dylan, welcome to the show.

Thank you, Josh. Good to be here.

Yeah, I’m excited to get into talking about the technology. But before we do that, could you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

Sure. My name is Dylan, I’m from Long Island, New York. Went to school in Nashville, Tennessee at a place called Vanderbilt where I studied neuroscience and business. Throughout my years, I’ve always been a premedical student, so spent some time working in the finance world, working in the healthcare world and that intersection.

Eventually, I actually went into med school. But before that, in college, was very involved with a program called Best Buddies and Best Buddies was where I met one of my closest friends who inspired me to start Ner Chat, which is where we’ve been ever since.

Nice, nice. And we do love Best Buddies, I’ve done some work with them before in the past and been able to be a part of it, so that’s awesome.

Well, you brought me right onto Ner Chat. I guess tell us about the company, and when and why it was started?

Yeah, totally. So it all started through Best Buddies with one of my close friends who I made there who, at the time, was using an AAC device and I did not know much about it. But I was so interested. And as we became closer and closer, I had decided that I just wanted to learn way more about his life, and started volunteering in local school districts and clinics to work with him and see how our loved ones are being supported.

And one of these things that came up was the use of visuals within the classroom. So we were finding that all of our learners were benefiting so much from visuals, yet all of our providers, being the teachers, the therapists, they were spending their Sundays manually dragging symbols or scrolling endlessly on their reseller marketplace looking for the right fit and paying out of pocket. So we said, “This is an opportunity to do better,” because the process of creating these visuals was just so cumbersome. And that’s where Glint really was born and Ner Chat was just the parent company, our brain child of just trying to be helpful in this space.

Awesome, awesome. And I guess onto Glint. I know we talked a little bit about visuals, but tell me, what is Glint?

Glint is all about making anyone a visual superhero. So Glint makes visuals ridiculously easy. And the second part is that it has a very novel access method, meaning you can both create and share visuals in the most successful way possible.

Nice. And I guess, for listeners that maybe don’t work in education or used it, what kind of visuals might we have? Can you give us some examples?

Yeah, yeah, great question. So when we think of visuals, we think of a storyboard. They could be a communication grid, it could be a social story, a task analysis. These are types of visuals that help our learners and our students really understand the world around them and there’s quite a variety of these. We split them up into a couple categories, but they end up being things that help for social-emotional learning, for daily acts of living, for literacy and even certain activities that are used in classrooms.

Very cool. And I guess how does it work?

So we took this approach of being AI-first, meaning it’s super, super blindingly simple. We have anyone who’s been making visuals for 40 years all the way to parents who have never touched a visual creation platform ever-

Nice.

… coming onto the platform. We take in your natural language, so your text or your speech, and translate that into one of our accessible formats or templates we call them. So for example, you would type in, “I’m trying to learn how to tie my shoes,” and Glint creates the step-by-step workflow with the voice output that speaks in over 40 languages.

Wow, nice. So very cool. So this could work for, if I think of a classroom or training situation, for individuals who speak different languages or even learn in different kinds of styles?

Exactly, yeah.

Awesome, awesome. So, Dylan, we mentioned a few different things. You talked about some different tasks and maybe other stuff. What other kinds of things could I learn using Glint, or I guess could I teach or train?

Yeah. So Glint really started off in this special education side of things. Special ed and speech pathology are the two biggest use cases in which we see Glint being used.

Oh, nice.

Because the templates that we’ve added are very applicable to those two spaces. And where it’s evolved is very much grassroots. We’ve only been around for seven months.

Oh, wow.

In the past seven months, this platform has been growing as quick as possible, both from a product perspective and from a usage perspective. Our user base has grown so, so quick and with that come the suggestions, with that come a lot of the requests that we get. So we have a very good pulse on what people are looking for in terms of visual creation. Generally, it’s what’s hard for them to create manually. They’re coming to us and saying, “Could you help me make this?”

As we started in this special ed, speech pathology side, we started adding a lot of accessibility functionality, such as high contrast, such as skin tone personalization, all these things, and even languages. And as we started adding these language speech capabilities, we started seeing even ENL, ELL, populations and departments starting to come to us and asking for Glint because the reach is far more accessible than just a space of special education. I can be for any learner in general who just prefers, who can resonate with visuals.

Oh, most definitely, or just needs that little bit extra information, having that visual. Yeah, English language learners or learning any second language, having a picture is so much more helpful than just having the words or the other kinds of parts there. And I know you mentioned AAC at the very beginning and somehow I completely almost glazed over it because I know for some folks, especially for parents, I know you said you’ve been working with a speech language pathologist. But I know sometimes for the parents, it can be challenging to make, oh, the communication boards and the different kinds of pieces for folks, so I love that you took that into consideration, too.

Yeah, definitely. And for our platform, it’s definitely we wouldn’t put ourselves in this category of AAC. When people are creating their simple grids on our platform, we’re actually more of the fringe vocabulary.

A couple of different use cases. Think you’re going to the zoo and you need vocabulary words for a specific exhibit, you ask Glint for it, it generates it for you and you can bring it with you on the go.

Nice. Nice. No, that’s excellent. I also like that you’re able to really customize the pictures, that was going to be my next question. If I say a cowboy and I’m like, “That’s not the right kind of cowboy, I need some different kinds of parts,” so I like that you can change the skin tone and really change some of the other pieces and components to really just help everyone learn so differently, to really help with that individual learning.

Yeah, totally.

Dylan, I always love to ask this question because you said you guys have got a lot of user feedback, you’ve got folks really using it. Has there been anything surprising? Has anyone surprised you with the way they’ve used it or maybe a way they’ve come up with using Glint that you weren’t expecting or that you just found really cool?

Wow, weren’t expecting. I think that one of our main … This reminds me of literally, I just got a video on Friday about this. One of the main access methods, apart from just printing or using this digitally, is you have the ability to send Glints via this idea we created called Glint Anywhere. And Glint Anywhere is all about being able to share high quality seekable visuals via links and QR codes. So we were the first to ever pioneer this whole space and it’s a new category. What we’re seeing is that parents and families can now take these visuals home and use them at home, in the workplace.

So a video I just got was an SLP letting me know that they have a minimally verbal student who also is multilingual. So she would be creating these boards that allowed the learner to go to McDonald’s and order their food.

Nice.

And it had all the menu items on the board so every time they would go in, they would bring in Glint and be able to use that to order. So they had one for the McDonald’s, they had one for the local pizza place. And just being able to see that, she was saying, “When I showed the parents what was possible and I started giving them these visuals in Glint, they started crying.” So I feel like that was such an amazing use case that we didn’t initially think of, but our users found it.

No, and that’s great. I’ve heard, and I’m not an SLP by any means and I always loved the work that they do, but I’ve heard from some folks sometimes it could be hard with boards and with AAC, just being limited I guess, maybe not having the exact words the individual wants. So being able to have a tool where you can more easily create, especially like you said, for those special use cases. So you can actually have when you’re going to McDonald’s, you don’t have to pick from the few buttons you have, you could have a little bit more there and then be able to share that information. So I love that.

Yeah.

As we’re talking about folks’ experiences, do you have another one that’s maybe stood out with you over the seven months that folks have been using Glint?

Yeah, yeah. Another one that really hit home for me was a specific student who really had a fear of going to the dentist and the dentist was a big, big fear of theirs, but the SLP knew that he loved watching Mario. So mom was having a really tough time with the student who would typically act out, would get a little upset right before going to the dentist or with any mention of the dentist. So what the SLP did was hopped onto Glint, made the social story, just a couple seconds with the person’s name and them watching Mario and going to the dentist. She sent that to mom and mom was telling us when the kid got in the car, he was silent. He was enraptured with the story and the story really helped him with that transition point. So when he got to the dentist, there was no issue, there was no more emotion. There was a sense of comfort and a new sense of autonomy that was there when he got there.

So the visual itself was that bridge for him to live a more independent and more fulfilling life in his experience with the dentist and not have those be overcome with any sort of negative emotions.

That’s super cool. Yeah, I can see with the social stories being able to help with those kind of experiences. I could see on the job with complex tasks and maybe putting things together with that. So many different, different kinds of uses for Glint. So I guess I have to ask, you said it’s just been seven months. What’s on the horizon and what’s next?

It’s a great question. Well, I can’t share everything that’s on the horizon.

Darn it.

We do have a lot of … Just going to leak the whole feature list here. So what I can say is this is just the beginning. The model that we’re developing, it’s a proprietary model, has become so complex and so layered in that it’s just getting better and better with the content and generations that we’re able to provide. Now that we have all this data, and of course anonymous and all completely high level. And we have this internal base of our users and also what people are asking us for via the help and via our various connections and champions, there’s a very clear roadmap for where we should be going. We’re following the patterns of need. When people are asking us, “I need more visuals to pertain to this side or that side.”

There are a couple of very interesting threads that we feel are gaps in the space that are underserved. One of them was language, that was just the start of this, but there’s a couple of other really, really interesting new innovations that will be coming out pretty soon. And the fun part is this, we’re really just barely scratching the surface as it relates to the application of AI in the space right now. So every time my team and I, we have a hackathon together, we do some amazing things. So just excited to start releasing more and more.

Awesome. We can’t wait to see just where it all goes. Well, Dylan, if our listeners want to find out more about Glint, what’s a good way for them to do that?

Yeah. The best way would be just going over to our website, which is www.N-E-R-C-H-A-T.com. Or you can follow us on our socials. So the socials are … What I’ve heard and what I love is so many people are sharing cool ways in which they’ve been utilizing Glint-

Nice.

… and that’s on our social media. It’s also Ner Chat everywhere, so N-E-R Chat on all platforms.

All right. We will put all that information down in the show notes so that folks can not just check out everything Glint can do, but also connect with other users and maybe find some other ways of using it they haven’t even thought of before.

Well, Dylan, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us about the idea and the brain child being Ner Chat and Glint and just how far it’s come. And we can’t wait to see how far it comes in the future.

Awesome. Thank you, Josh. Really appreciate you having me.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on Assistive Technology Update? If so, call our listener line at 317-721-7124, send us an email at tech@eastersealscrossroads.org, or shoot us a note on Twitter @indataproject.

Our captions and transcripts for the show are sponsored by the Indiana Telephone Relay Access Corporation, or INTRAC. You can find out more about INTRAC at relayindiana.com. A special thanks to Nikol Prieto for scheduling our amazing guests and making a mess of my schedule. Today’s show was produced, edited, hosted and fraught over by yours truly. The opinions expressed by our guests are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easterseals Crossroads, our supporting partners or this host. This was your Assistive Technology Update and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easterseals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.