Last week, I wandered the beautiful chaos that is CES 2026, part technicolor dream, part future fever dream, in my role as a strategic advisor to, and small shareholder in, Innosearch.ai.
Thanks to the CTA Foundation, Innosearch had a home in Eureka Park, tucked into the Venetian Expo Center, Hall G. And let me tell you, Eureka Park had it going on.
This corner of CES pulsed with companies centering accessibility, assistive tech, and disability inclusion. Our booth sat steps away from innovators connected to Remarkable.org, including Glidance, BlueBerry Technologies, Ask Gramma, and Good Trouble.
Being there felt exhilarating. Affirming. Like finally finding your people at a massive party. These were builders who get it: that universal design doesn’t narrow markets, it expands them. That disability inclusion isn’t charity; it’s innovation with receipts.
And then… I stepped back into the rest of CES.
Eleven venues. Roughly 136,000 attendees. And a sobering reality check. Thousands, literally thousands, of products were not designed to be universally usable. Flat touch screens with no tactile reference points. Tiny visual displays. Apps that simply don’t work with screen readers, meaning blind folks like me are locked out before we even get to the demo.
So here’s the strategic itch I couldn’t stop scratching: Is clustering accessibility innovation in Eureka Park actually limiting its impact?
Don’t get me wrong, I applaud Eureka Park. It’s a beacon. But it’s also a choir loft, and a lot of the conversations happening there felt… familiar. Like-minded people talking to like-minded people.
What if, instead, accessibility-focused companies were woven throughout CES? Not segregated, but integrated. Would that be like adding a few drops of dye to a massive pool, too diluted to notice? Or would it slowly, inevitably, change the color of the whole system?
That’s a systems-change question worth wrestling with.
Some quick context from the CES time machine: the last time I attended (2021), we were flashing negative COVID tests just to get badges. The vibe then? Robotics everywhere. Robots mixing drinks. Robots delivering mail. Robots cooking dinner like it’s no big deal.
This year, the headline was unmistakable: AI. AI everywhere. AI inside everything. AI stitched into thousands of products like digital DNA.
Which brings us to both promise and peril.
AI has extraordinary potential to advance disability inclusion, smarter interfaces, personalized supports, real-time adaptation. But AI also mirrors us. And if we’re not careful, it will faithfully reproduce our biases, our blind spots, our exclusions, at scale and at speed.
Accessibility cannot be an afterthought bolted on by version 3.0. It has to be baked in from the jump. The data we train on. The assumptions we encode. The voices we include (or don’t) in design rooms.
And that’s why, despite the frustrations, I left CES hopeful.
Because Eureka Park wasn’t just a section of the show, it was a signal. A proof point. A reminder that the future can be built differently, by people who see disability not as an edge case, but as a design advantage.
The energy was real. The innovation was undeniable. And if we’re bold enough to let that energy spill out of Hall G and into the rest of the ecosystem, the ripple effects could be extraordinary.
The future is being built right now. Let’s make sure everyone gets to use it.
” Inclusion isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s a strategic advantage. “
Dr. Kirk Adams, Ph.D.
Advocate, Leader and Keynote Speaker on Disability Inclusion & Leadership
Leading the Way to Accessible Innovation
Institute for Sustainable Diversity and Inclusion (ISDI)
Executive Director
Strengthening individual and organizational capability for creating diverse, inclusive and equitable workplaces.
Innovative Impact, LLC Consulting
Managing Director
Impactful Workforce Inclusion Starts Here
American Foundation for the Blind
Immediate Past President & CEO
To create a world of no limits for people who are blind or visually impaired.
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