269 - Bryan Duarte part 2: Who Gets to Read a Face in Public
Part 2 with Bryan Duarte, co-founder and CTO of HapWare. In the ALEYE app, a wearer builds presets for work, home or date night and picks which cues come through. The options include a smile, a furrowed brow (cmon AD writers, you know that one), a handshake, a fist bump and, yes, the middle finger.
Bryan explains why the camera is still the hardest problem: 15 frames per second on Meta glasses, 51 on an iPhone. He also takes on the harder question of what happens when the person being read never agreed to it. His answer draws on 13 years with his guide dog, Dixon, and on what happened to guide dog access once people started putting vests on their pets. He's taking the same case to legislators writing new camera laws.
Audio Description gives blind audiences the smile on screen. Bryan is working on the smile across the table.
29 Sept 2026
268 - Bryan Duarte - Hapware - part 1
Bryan Duarte lost his sight at 18 in a motorcycle accident. He went on to earn a PhD in computer science studying one question: can touch carry what sight usually carries? Today he's co-founder and CTO of HapWare, building ALEYE. It's a wristband paired with a camera that reads facial expressions, gestures and body language. It plays each one as a pattern of vibrations on the wearer's wrist.
In Part 1, Bryan talks about what the wristband feels like after a few hours and why learning the patterns is like learning a new ringtone. He also explains why HapWare stopped trying to tell a slight smile from a big one. Audio Description runs into the same question. A script can say "She smiles." The performance decides whether that smile is flirty, sarcastic or barely there. ALEYE tells the wearer someone smiled and leaves the meaning to them.
1 Sept 2026
Timothy Prewitt: Don't Look at the Top of the Mountain
Timothy Prewitt spent 30 years across 16 countries, solving seemingly unsolvable problems like hunger, water, and agriculture. To name a few: Kosovo after the war. Afghanistan. Nigeria. He ran The Hunger Project and iDE, reaching close to 13 million people a year. He also keeps a 35-year silent meditation practice, fasts alone in the mountains for four days at a stretch, and plays a lot of pinball.
His work has nothing to do with Audio Description.
This one is about how you start when the task in front of you is too big to look at. For Audio Description, there can be hundreds of description cues and not enough hours. Invoices nobody is paying. A career being squeezed by politics or technology. For Tim, his answer is small and usable, and it comes from Everest guides: don't look at the top of the mountain, just take the very next step.
Along the way: why still water lets you see what's under it, why the people closest to a problem are the ones who solve it, and the truckload of donated hospital equipment that taught a 22-year-old idealist why good intentions need real expertise behind them.
Tim writes at timprewitt.substack.com.
More on the work Roy does with executives and media teams: parityendeavors.com
Who has been a guest on The ADNA Presents
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Tanusree Sharma
Jeremy Seda
Anna Capezzera
Colleen Connor
Serina Gilbert
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