Design / Habitat Learn
Cognitive Accessibility Tools
I’m VP of Product at Habitat Learn, where we build cognitive-accessibility software for higher education. The publicly-facing work lives here.
Products
Lecture capture, transcription, live captions, and an AI study assistant in one app — used across 350+ colleges and universities, including UC Berkeley, Harvard, and the University of Toronto. Now on Mac.
A secure, on-device accessibility system built into the classroom itself. Mac hardware captures every lecture and generates live captions, transcripts, and notes on-campus — universal by default, no student request required.
English, French, Spanish, and Danish spoken simultaneously by different speakers, unified into one caption stream in each viewer's language of choice. Built for OttawaU lectures, international meetings, and beyond.
Messenger Pigeon
Messenger Pigeon is where learning meets inclusion: lecture capture, instant searchable transcripts, live captions, AI or professional notes, human-like text-to-speech, and an AI Study Assistant that turns a forty-minute lecture into something a student can actually study from later.
It runs across 350+ colleges and universities — UC Berkeley, Harvard, the University of Toronto — and is now available on Mac. HIPAA-compliant, WCAG-aligned, built on Zero-Retention AI so lecture content is never used to train models.
Podium
Podium moves accessibility from reactive accommodation to classroom infrastructure. An instructor starts a session from the podium; Apple hardware in the room captures the lecture and processes audio on-device, generating live captions, transcripts, summaries, and study tools — without sending data off-campus by default.
Captions and notes are available to every student from week one, not just those with documented disabilities. Processing happens on institution-owned hardware with clear data governance. The first pilot is live at Humber College, built with faculty, IT, accessibility teams, and students as a repeatable, governance-ready model.
How I work
The first principle is listening
Habitat Learn ships software that helps students with cognitive disabilities access spoken instruction — captioning, note-taking, lecture capture, the infrastructure that turns a forty-minute lecture into something a student can actually study from later. Messenger Pigeon is live across 350+ institutions; Podium is piloting in real classrooms at Humber.
Before deciding what to ship, I spend time with accessibility leads, resource teachers, AT consultants, the students using current tools, and the staff frustrated by them. Frustration is where the signal is. The best way to know whether a product is needed is to ask the people who would have to live with it.
I had attention difficulties and undiagnosed cognitive differences in school. I found my way to working accommodations in university, mostly by accident, and the difference between before and after was enormous. The work I do at Habitat Learn is not separate from that experience — it’s built on it.