ATU795 – Tovala Smart Oven with David Rabie

Hi. This is David Rabie, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Tovala. 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 Easter Seals Crossroads, beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to episode 795 of Assistive Technology Update. It is scheduled to be released on August 21st, 2026. In today’s show, we’re super excited to welcome David Rabie to the show. He’s here to talk about the Tovala Smart Oven and smart meals and how it can help with accessible cooking for individuals with disabilities. We’re also joined by BridgingApps with An App Worth Mentioning. We got a story about some new accessibility coming to Phoenix Airport, as well as sharing a blog post about how things are becoming more accessible in finance. As always, listeners, we thank you so much for taking time out of your day to give us a listen. 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. This 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 podcasts 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.

Listeners, as you may know here at INDATA, we do full-day trainings all throughout the year, and I’m very excited to announce that our next full-day training is coming up on August 26th, 2026, and it is over wearable assistive technology. This training will be in person here at Easter Seals Crossroads in Indianapolis, Indiana, but we will be streaming it. So, if you are not able to make it here to our office, well, I’d say try to find a way, but if you’re not able to make it here to the office, you can log in online. You do have to register beforehand, and I will put a link down in the show notes so that you can easily get over and register. With that link, you can also get into the archive of our previous full-day training. So, if there’s something you want to learn more about or maybe a training that you attended that you want to watch again, you can always find them in there.

But as far as our wearable AT training coming up on August 26, this training will be over all kinds of different wearable assistive technology for health and wellness, for control, to help with vision, community access, work, and a whole myriad of other needs. If you’re here in person, you’ll get to try out some of these amazing accommodations. And if you’re online, we’ll make sure to try to keep you as involved as possible. If you happen to need continuing education units for certifications or other needs, you can get CEUs by attending our trainings.

So, whether you’re new to Assistive Technology, an old pro, or just looking to learn a little bit more, please do attend our INDATA full-day training coming up on August 26th, 2026 over wearable assistive technology. The training will be from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Eastern Time. And again, it will be in person here at Easter Seals Crossroads and also online, streamed via Zoom. You do have to register in order to attend the training, and I will put a link down in the show notes to go and get to the registration. All of us here INDATA look forward to seeing you there either in person or remotely on August 26th for wearable assistive technology full-day training.

Listeners, I’ll start us off with a story about the Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport. This is a press release from them stating that Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport partners with ReBokeh to provide free assistive technology for travelers. So, folks who don’t know what ReBokeh is, they can go back and actually listen. We had Rebecca Rosenberg, their founder and CEO on the show back in 2024. So, wow, that’s been a while ago, I guess. But anyway, it is an assistive technology tool for individuals who are low vision, but retains some functional site.

And it says here that, “Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport is the first airport in the Southwest partnering with ReBokeh to empower the 90% of people with low vision who retain functional site to travel with independence.” It says, “The airport’s now offering free access to ReBokeh’s assistive technology software for people with low vision. It’s provided to travelers and staff with free unlimited access.” Folks who don’t know what ReBokeh is, it says here, “It’s a mobile app-based assistive technology software that helps people with low vision to adjust the appearance of the world around them in order to fit their specific needs.” PHX Airport becomes the first airport in the Southwest U.S. to offer ReBokeh’s technology for free. Says their smaller airports, Deer Valley Airport and Goodyear Airport, will also offer ReBokeh.

Folks who haven’t seen it before, ReBokeh allows the user to use the live camera feed on their mobile device. And then, they have overlays, custom filters, and other things that help with contrast, hue, zoom, lighting, other things to be able to help low-vision users. It also says that ReBokeh has ReBokeh AI, a brand new feature, which offers the opportunity for lengthened interactions with ReBokeh’s custom-built AI tool. Can ask questions about what’s around them, what they’re seeing, and other things like that. I’ll put a link to this over in the show notes so that folks can go and check it out, but a great accommodation for individuals using the Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport, and really great to see ReBokeh really getting this recognition and being a tool available for travelers.

Again, I will put a link over in the show note. There’s actually a video if you scroll down a little bit as well as a link to ReBokeh. And like I said, if you want to learn a little bit more about Rebecca Rosenberg, their CEO and founder, or about the software, you can go back and check out episode 659 from 2024 of this podcast to learn more.

So, our next story comes to us from The Finanser. This is a blog written by Chris Skinner, and it’s titled How Technology is Making Disability Less Disabling. As you can probably guess with this coming from The Finanser, it does get into banking a little bit, but I read the story, and I got to admit, I agree with Chris on a lot of things. Working long enough with individuals with disability, I’ve really truly come to believe that it’s the systems we build in an inaccessible world that truly just add to disability and the everyday life that individuals with disabilities experience. And that’s kind of the point that this blog makes.

And just to quote the beginning of it, it says, “For centuries, we’ve designed the world for the able-bodied and called everyone else disabled. Today, technology is quietly rewriting those rules. It’s making finance communication work and everyday life adapt to people rather than forcing people to adapt to systems.” Long-time listeners of the show, you may know that we had [inaudible 00:07:30], the creator of Morphic on and actually ended up having a very long conversation with him about just artificial intelligence. Where is it going and where does he really see it progressing? And the number one thing he was excited about was the user interface, I guess. The user interface changes that artificial intelligence could bring about to where, again, those systems would completely adapt to the user as opposed to the user having to adapt to the system itself or the interface.

Get back to the story here. Chris says, “I think disability tells us less about the individual than it does about the system.” For an example he gives, “A blind person is disabled if information only exists on paper. Someone who’s deaf is excluded if every interaction depends upon hearing,” and so on and so forth. Then, he gets into if you change the technology remarkably, you often change the disability or at least the prevalence of it, the amount that it affects the daily life. Jumps into how artificial intelligence is beginning to adapt to each individual rather than the other way around. And he really, again, with this being The Finanser, really digs into how that is in finance. Physical branches, printed forms, pin pads, cash, face-to-face conversations, signatures, all these things aren’t technically needed as much as they used to be. A lot of times, you can do this with a digital identity. You can have a voice assistant, facial recognition, use these things instead of signatures. You could use our AI to explain complex financial products in plain language.

If you’re neurodivergent, you don’t have to walk into a loud branch with a ton of people there and wait in line in order to do things. If you’ve got any kind of physical challenge, you’re not trying to push that little pin pad, trying to put your numbers and things in there. So, it really just gets into tons of different ways. He really looks at it from a financial products and bank financial kind of things, but really just some of the ways the technology has caught up and is accessible just because it’s accessible. It wasn’t made to be accessible for individuals with disabilities. It’s just made to be accessible for everyone, which therefore does help individuals with disabilities.

And it goes down a little bit more and it gives some user stories, talks about how this can also help keep individuals safe. And then, he digs into something called Project Nemo. Says here that, “Project Nemo brings together banks, FinTech firms, technology companies, and most importantly, people with lived experience and asks the industry to adapt financial services to people, to make, again, everything just a little bit more accessible for everyone, including individuals with disabilities.”

I won’t read all of Chris’s blog here, but I will definitely put a link to it down in the show notes. Again, it’s an interesting read. I agree with a lot of his viewpoints. And if I’m reading this right, I don’t believe that Chris works in disability or anything like that. Just something he’s a bit excited about, which is super-duper cool. So, anyway, we’ll put a link to this over in the show notes so that you can go and give it a look 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 Helperbird. Helperbird is an accessibility app and web extension that makes reading, writing, and browsing the web easier for people with a variety of learning and accessibility needs. It includes tools like text-to-speech, voice typing, dyslexia-friendly fonts, reading mode, and word prediction, OCR text extraction, and customizable color overlays to create a more personalized browsing experience. Our favorite features were the distraction-free reading mode and the wide range of accessibility tools all in one place. Helperbird can help users stay focused, improve reading comprehension, and make digital content more accessible for individuals with dyslexia, ADHD, low vision, and other accessibility needs. It works across websites, PDFs, and many online documents, making it a valuable tool for school, work, and everyday life. Helperbird is available as a web extension for Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Safari, and is also available as an app for iOS devices. For more information on this app and others like it, visit www.bridgingapps.org.

Listeners, so maybe it’s because it’s around lunchtime, but I’m very excited to get to talking to our next guest. David Rabie is founder and CEO of Tovala, and he’s here to tell us how Tovala meals and their Smart Oven are working to make cooking and enjoying great food more accessible to individuals of all abilities. And I, for one, am hungry to learn more. And honestly, maybe just a little bit hungry too, which definitely isn’t going to hurt. David, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Josh. Excited to be here.

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

Yeah, so I’m originally from California, father of three young girls, and now live in Chicago with my wife and kids, and started this company a little over a decade ago with a mission to help people eat better. And we’ve been really fortunate to grow the company and service hundreds of thousands of people all across the U.S.

Awesome. Awesome. And yeah, eating better is definitely something that’s very, very important. I know that eating right can just help out with so many kind of different things. So, I guess let’s just start at the beginning. David, where did the idea come from to start Tovala?

Well, I was in grad school in Chicago, and like a lot of people, found myself short on time and still trying to figure out how to get dinner on the table on an ordinary night, and was cooking for myself one day, and it was taking forever, and I was using multiple appliances. And I thought there’s got to be a way to get a home-cooked meal, a meal that’s cooked from scratch, from raw ingredients, but not actually spend all the time cooking. And I tried the convenient solutions that were out there, whether that was meal kits where they sent you ingredients and you did the work yourself or pre-cooked meals that you reheated in the microwave. And I just felt like everything fell short somewhere, whether it was the freshness and taste of the food or the amount of time that was required to make it happen.

And that’s when I started thinking, well, what if we built a system kind of like a Nespresso machine, but instead of coffee, we replaced it with fresh ingredients and had a magical device that would cook them for you automatically? And that was the beginning of the idea, and I incubated it in grad school, and that helped us get it off the ground.

Nice, nice. And we’ll dig into the meals a little, and maybe dig in’s not… That is the right word actually, but we’ll dig into the meals a little bit more as we go. But onto the oven itself, I guess just start off with what is it?

Yeah, it’s a countertop Smart Oven that can air fry while one of our models can steam, it can bake, it can toast, it can reheat. So, it can do a whole lot of different things for your own food, but then it’s also designed to cook our meals just by scanning a QR code. And the oven has a scanner on it. Our meals come with QR codes for every meal. So, as a customer, you do maybe 45 seconds of preparation, put your food in the oven, scan a code, then the oven cooks it perfectly. So, it uses all those functions I talked about and different temperatures and times, much like almost having a chef in your home, but fully automated.

Nice. And David, I know that the oven can really be beneficial to individuals with different disabilities. When you first made it, did you know about that it was going to be accessible to individuals? Or I guess if you didn’t, when did you become aware that this could help folks out?

We did not know. We did have a early engineer on our team, Josh, who built some features specifically for accessibility, but the product was not, I’d say on the whole built for that audience. But over time, we found initially, a few, then dozens, then hundreds of people using the product that found it really, really helpful, whether they were visually impaired, or people in wheelchairs, or people with intellectual disabilities. It served a really, really great use case for folks that otherwise, cooking appliances can have a whole bunch of different challenges in using. And our product, some of it luck, some of it intentional, solved a lot of those challenges.

Nice. And I guess to expand off that, I guess, I know that now, you know how accessible it is to folks. How has that changed and grown over the years?

All word of mouth, to be honest. We’ve continued to invest in some of the feature set, but in terms of reaching this audience, it really has been organic and not something we’ve deliberately pursued. We want to get the word out more. We think we can make a bigger impact by spreading the word, but it’s not something we have done deliberately. It’s just been, I think people realize it’s helpful to them and working really well, and they tell other people.

Nice. Very, very cool. So, David, I got to dig in to the meals a little bit. I know you talked a little bit about the idea came from, I don’t want the pre-cooked frozen meals and also some of the other ones, I still have to do a lot of prep. I just get the raw ingredients. I guess describe some of the meals. I know we can’t go through all of them. I know there’s quite a few, but just, I guess, the experience, as you said, “It takes about 45 seconds of prep.” What does that look like?

Yeah, so let’s take a standard meal. Chicken parm and stuffed shells, one of our most popular dishes is a nice example. So, you’d get a chicken breast that’s completely uncooked. It is brined in our own custom marinade, and it comes with its own instructions. It comes with a spice pack, and it comes with a vac sealed chicken breast, and then, the chicken parm on the side. Or excuse me, the stuffed shells on the side. And so, for that dish, it comes with marinara sauce. You put the marinara sauce on the chicken breast. You add some cheese on top. I think that’s all the prep you do in advance. Put that in, you put the stuffed shells into the Tovala. You scan the QR code. That meal probably takes 20 minutes. You get a push notification on your phone when it’s done. The oven plays a little jingle when it’s done, so you don’t even need your phone, and that’s it. And you take your food out and enjoy. No cleanup required.

So, that meal is actually even a little more involved than some meals where all you do is add a spice packet. But just to give you a sense, it’s pretty minimal. And the cheese melts beautifully on the stuffed shells and on the chicken itself. The chicken is still super juicy because of the brine and because of the steam. Meal tastes amazing. Portion control, and actually that meal is only, I think, five, 600 calories.

Wow, nice, nice. Yeah. And actually, it sounds like real ingredients. You’re not getting all the preservatives and everything else, I imagine, as well.

Exactly.

Very cool. Very cool. And you mentioned a little bit the push notification on the phone. So, I know there’s an app component or can be. Can you describe that a little bit to me?

Yeah, so the app is used for a few things. The first is getting your oven connected to Wi-Fi, and you need to get your oven connected because every week, there’s new meals on the menu. Every meal has its own custom cooking instructions. But once it’s connected to Wi-Fi, if you don’t want to use your phone app again, you don’t need to. But if you do, you can do a whole bunch of things. You can order your meals on the app, and I find that pretty fun. You get to pick from 40 to 45 options every week. You can get some guided recipes. So, if you want to make your own food, elaborate recipes are very… If you just want to make a piece of salmon, there’s a salmon button in the app. So, a whole bunch of cool things in there, and it does get used a lot. And I should add, there’s screen reader integrations on the apps for both Android and iPhone.

Nice. You already answered my next question there. I was just going to make sure, but I kind of assumed since we were talking about accessibility, it was probably able to work with that. So, I love that I can make my own food, but be able to use the oven to use it. But then also, of course, especially as you said, if I’m a grad student, a busy person, a senior, a whole lot of other things where I just don’t maybe have time to do everything, I can easily just scan that QR code, put a few pieces together and get the oven to do all the heavy lifting for me.

Exactly.

Whenever it comes to meals, and again, we can’t go through all of them, but maybe what kinds are available? How often do new ones come out? And then, are there ones for folks with maybe certain food allergies and such?

Yeah, we’ve got, call it 40 to 45 every week. Most are lunch and dinner meals, although I’d say there’s a couple breakfast options every week. We serve lots of different diets. So, gluten-free, low carb, Mediterranean, high protein, meals made for people on GLP-1 medications. Wide range of calories. Probably the lowest caloric meals we’ve got are maybe 400, but goes up to 1,000. Single serving all the way through family style. So, you can serve a family of four really, really comfortably. They’re very generous portions. The family meals are, I think, as low as 7.99 a serving, whereas meals for individuals tend to be 13.99. So, really wide range. And there’s Asian cuisine, and Mexican cuisine, and Italian, and American, and then, regular rotation. So, every week, the menu looks a little different, and there’s constant new innovation on there, so it really never gets old.

Nice, nice. So, yeah, new choices and everything else so you don’t get tired, but if there’s something you really do like, odds are you’re still going to be able to get it and be able to have that. I know especially, I know you mentioned you got three kids there, so I know sometimes there’s the one meal that if we don’t have every week, I’m going to get in trouble, at least with my kids. So, that’s always good. David, you’ve been doing this quite a while. Do you have maybe a story about someone either using the meals or the Smart Oven that really sticks with you? Maybe it was able to help them cook independently or something along those lines?

What’s crazy is we hear stories like that almost every week. And sometimes it’s people posting on social media, sometimes it’s emails that I get from folks. And yeah, I think what you said is probably the one that hits home the hardest are people that before Tovala, were never able to cook for whatever reason. And it’s a whole bunch of different reasons for people. And they feel like they’re not only able to cook, but empowered. And even though it’s maybe just a couple steps, adding a spice mix or adding marinara and cheese, it still creates this real sense of autonomy and empowerment that people get when they’re in the kitchen making food for themselves that you don’t get if you’re reheating something in the microwave. And we never set out to do that, but I think all of us get pretty proud inside when we hear those stories and how we’re able to positively impact people’s lives.

Most definitely. And yeah, just because you maybe didn’t build it with that need, you still tried to make something that was, like you said, it still met a need. It’s still when I don’t have the time or maybe some of the other things needed to be able to cook, and then, you end up opening that up to a whole nother world of folks. Whether you meant to or not, it doesn’t matter at the end of the day because it ended up doing it. David, what’s next for Tovala?

Probably the most interesting thing if you’re a customer is we want to grow the menu much larger than it is today, mainly to just serve all the different ways that people want to eat. We serve some diets today. We think there’s a much broader selection of diets we can serve. And if we really look out there, we’d love to get to a point of real personalization so that you come to the Tovala menu, and that menu is really designed for you in terms of all the different ways and restrictions or preferences that you have when it comes to your food.

Nice, nice. Yep. Just continue to grow and continue to make all different kinds of meals and things more accessible to folks. So, that’d be great. David, if our listeners want to find out more, check out the menu, check out the oven, everything, what’s a good way for them to be able to do that?

Tovala.com is the best place, or if you want to hear what customers are saying, any social media site. So, YouTube, or Reddit, or Facebook, there’s a lot of content out there created by customers.

Awesome. Awesome. And then, David, you had something special you wanted to share with the listeners.

Yes. So, if you’re interested in getting a Tovala for yourself, we’ve got a special deal for listeners. So, just go to Tovala.com and if you enter the promo code A-T UPDATE, all caps, you’ll be able to get the PRO oven, that’s the one with steam, for $99 and 50% off your first week. So, first week of meals, I should say. So, it’s a great deal, great way to get into the system and service and try it out, and hopefully, love it as much as our hundreds of thousands of customers do.

Awesome. We will put that information down in the show notes along with links and everything else. Well, David, thank you so much for coming on today, for telling us about the Tovala Smart Oven, the meals, and then, just the way that you were making cooking more accessible to all and ended up making it more accessible to individuals with all different kinds of needs. Thank you again.

Thank you for having me.

Do you have a question about assistive technology? Do you have a suggestion for someone we should interview on an 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 Nicole Prieto for scheduling our amazing guest 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 guest are their own and may or may not reflect those of the INDATA Project, Easter Seals Crossroads, our supporting partners, or this host. This was your assistive technology update, and I’m Josh Anderson with the INDATA Project at Easter Seals Crossroads in beautiful Indianapolis, Indiana. We look forward to seeing you next time. Bye-bye.