Smart Glasses and Disability: Lifeline or Liability?

A blind man stands in his kitchen, glasses on, guide dog at his feet, and asks what the washing machine dial is set to. The glasses tell him. Across the country, a Deaf town planner sits in a project meeting and reads every word his colleagues say, captioned in the lens in front of him, without waiting for someone to fill him in afterwards. Neither of them is doing anything remarkable. That is exactly the point.

Smart glasses have had a rough few months in Australia. Western Australia has banned them in public schools. Councils have banned them at pools and childcare centres. A Senate bill proposes a 12 month import ban. The federal government is weighing up whether to prohibit them in public service workplaces, and the phrase "pervert glasses" has entered the national vocabulary.

Some of that anger is earned. Some of the cheapest glasses on the market are, frankly, a security disaster. But in the rush to legislate, something important is being lost: for the people we work with every day, blind, low vision, Deaf and hard of hearing Australians, AI smart glasses are the most significant piece of assistive technology in a decade. Both things are true. Our view is that good policy, and good organisational practice, has to hold them together.

Why this matters so much to the people we serve

The ABC spoke this week to Chris Edwards, chief mission officer at Vision Australia, who is blind, and Matt Henderson, an Adelaide town planner who has been deaf since birth. Both described the glasses as transformative. Edwards called them "life changing" for blind people. Henderson said they had greatly increased his confidence and reduced how much he relies on other people.

That second point is the one we want every policymaker to sit with. Independence is not a nice extra. For many people with disability, every day involves a steady stream of small requests for help: what does this sign say, which button is start, what did she just say, is this the right platform. Each request costs time, privacy and dignity. A device that removes even half of those requests changes a life in ways that are hard to see from the outside.

Here is what the glasses are actually doing for people right now:

• Reading the world on demand. Menus, mail, medication labels, appliance settings, street signs and recipes, read aloud by asking a question rather than holding a phone steady over the page.
• Describing scenes. Who is in the room, what is on the shelf, whether the light is red or green, which door is the entrance.
• Calling a human when AI is not enough. Be My Eyes runs on Meta's glasses in Australia and connects the wearer, by voice command, to a sighted volunteer who sees through the camera and helps.
• Captioning conversations. Live captions in the lens for meetings, service counters and social settings, which for many hard of hearing people is the difference between taking part and nodding along.
• Navigation and translation. Turn by turn directions spoken into the ear while walking, and on the spot translation of speech and text.
• All of it hands free. This is the detail sighted, hearing commentators most often miss. A blind person already has one hand on a cane or a harness. A phone needs the other. Glasses give that hand back for the handrail, the coffee cup or the shopping.

And the price has collapsed. Specialist assistive glasses used to cost thousands of dollars, often many thousands, and were out of reach for most people without NDIS or employer funding. Mainstream AI glasses now cost around $600. That is a genuine shift in who can access this kind of independence.

We want to be precise about one limit, because the Deaf community has raised it themselves. Captions are not Auslan. Auslan is a complete language with its own grammar, and for many Deaf people written English is a second language. Captioning glasses are a valuable tool for some people, especially those who are hard of hearing or late deafened, but they are not a substitute for a qualified interpreter and should never be offered as one. We explain more about this cohort in our guide to auditory disabilities.

What Australians are actually buying

We went looking for the ten best selling smart glasses in Australia over the past year. We could not find a credible, publicly available ranking of the top selling smart glasses in Australia by unit sales over the past year. Retailers do not publish it, and the analyst firms that track it (Counterpoint, IDC and GfK) sell the country level detail as paid research. Rather than invent a top ten, here is what the reputable data does say:

• Australia is a big market for this. Counterpoint Research ranks Australia as the third largest market in the world for smart glasses without a display, the camera and audio style that Meta popularised.
• The category is growing very fast. Counterpoint reported global AI glasses sales up 263 per cent in the first half of 2026 compared with the same period in 2025.
• One company dominates. IDC put Meta at roughly 69 per cent of the global smart glasses market in the first quarter of 2026. Counterpoint, counting AI glasses only, puts Meta's share above 90 per cent across its Ray Ban, Oakley and own brand ranges.
• The cheap end sells out. Kmart's $89 Anko smart glasses sold out nationally earlier this year, and similar unbranded glasses have been sold for as little as $60 through Temu, Amazon and major retail marketplaces.

In practice, the Australian market sits in four tiers, and the tier matters far more than the brand when you are thinking about accessibility and risk:

The cheap end of the market is where it goes wrong

In September the ABC commissioned independent security researchers from NSB Cyber and Abstract Shield to test two pairs of ultra cheap glasses: a $60 pair from Temu and a $110 pair sold by a Sydney importer through Big W Marketplace. Similar models were sold by Dick Smith, Kmart and Amazon, and all appeared to use the same companion app.

The results were about as bad as security testing gets. The lead researcher found more than a dozen flaws and said not a single thing had been done correctly. Among them:

• Anyone nearby could take over the glasses. Glasses that were switched on but not yet paired could be connected to by a stranger over Bluetooth, with no password at all. The attacker could then take new photos and recordings, and copy everything already stored on the device.
• Audio and images could be intercepted on their way from the glasses to the owner's phone, and the data did not appear to be encrypted.
• The device identified its owner. A device ID broadcast to anyone in range could be used, through a flaw in the vendor's website, to find the owner's email address and date of birth.
• Data went offshore without clear disclosure. Anything spoken to the built in AI assistant, and any image sent to it, went first to a server in Shenzhen, China. The privacy policy mentioned Singapore, not China.

Legal experts told the ABC the flaws likely breach the Privacy Act and Australian Consumer Law. The supplier to several retailers has since stopped selling smart glasses, and the Privacy Commissioner has opened an investigation.

Why this risk lands hardest on people with disability

This is the part of the story that has not been told, and it is why we felt we had to write this piece.

A sighted person who buys novelty glasses uses the camera for holiday clips. A blind person who buys the same glasses uses the camera to read their bank statement, their medication label, their Centrelink letter, their child's school report and the PIN pad at the checkout. The more useful the glasses are as assistive technology, the more sensitive the information that passes through them. A Bluetooth flaw on a toy is an embarrassment. The same flaw on an assistive device is a stream of someone's most private documents, available to anyone sitting nearby on the train.

There is a second problem. A blind user cannot easily see whether a recording light is on, whether the glasses have paired with an unfamiliar device, or whether an app has quietly changed its permissions. Security models that rely on the user noticing something visual quietly exclude the people who most need protection. That is an accessibility failure in its own right, not just a security one.

And the people most likely to buy the $60 pair are often the people with the least margin. Disability and low income travel together in Australia. When the mainstream option costs ten times as much, the cheap one is not a casual choice. It is the only one on the table.

Our position: regulate the conduct, not the cane

We do not think the answer is a ban. Covert filming of people without consent is already wrong, and in many contexts already unlawful. A ban on the device punishes the many people using it for independence in order to inconvenience the few using it to cause harm, and it sends a message to disabled Australians that their access is negotiable the moment it becomes awkward for everyone else.

Carve outs help, and we welcome that the proposed import ban includes one for devices sold as disability aids, and that WA has promised exemptions for students with additional needs. But carve outs on their own are not enough. An exemption that requires a blind person to produce paperwork at the pool gate, or explain their diagnosis to a security guard, is not access. The burden ends up on exactly the wrong person.

What we would like to see instead is simple:

• Rules that target behaviour. Recording people without consent in change rooms, pools, classrooms and clinics should be prohibited regardless of the device. That covers phones too.
• Real minimum security standards, enforced. Australia's new cyber security laws for smart devices, which require unique passwords among other things, need to bite on wearables quickly. A camera on your face that anyone can connect to should not be legal to sell.
• Assistive use designed in, not bolted on. Disability organisations, and disabled people themselves, should be at the table when the privacy rules are drafted, not consulted after the fact.

What this means for your organisation

Most of the organisations we work with are not making national policy. But plenty of them are, right now, writing a smart glasses rule for their offices, venues, schools or customer sites. Here is how our work connects to getting that right.

If you are writing a smart glasses policy

Before you ban them, remember that refusing an employee or customer the use of their assistive technology can amount to a failure to make reasonable adjustments under the Disability Discrimination Act. Write the policy around behaviour (no recording without consent, no devices in defined sensitive areas) with a clear, low friction path for assistive use. Train front line staff to recognise and support it, so a blind customer is not challenged at the door. Our consulting and strategy team can help you draft a policy that manages privacy risk without creating discrimination risk, and our training can bring front line teams up to speed.

If you are buying assistive technology for staff

Do not let the budget line push you to the bottom tier. Ask the questions a procurement team would ask of any device that handles personal information: where is voice and image data processed and stored, is it encrypted, can the device be paired by anyone nearby, how long does the vendor commit to security updates, and is the companion app itself accessible to the person who will use it. We help organisations build exactly these accessibility and security questions into their procurement and compliance processes.

If you build the companion app, or anything the glasses read

The glasses are only half the experience. The other half is a phone app that must be set up, paired and configured, often by a blind user with VoiceOver or TalkBack. We regularly find companion apps for assistive hardware that are themselves inaccessible, which is a special kind of irony. An independent accessibility audit and user testing with blind, low vision, Deaf and hard of hearing participants using their own devices will tell you quickly whether the setup journey actually works.

And if you publish menus, signage, forms, PDFs or websites, the glasses are now one of your readers. An AI describing a scanned image of a menu is guessing. An AI reading a properly structured document or page is reading. Everything we argued in what else can't see applies here: good structure, real text and meaningful alternatives make your content work for screen readers, search engines and the AI on someone's face. Our document remediation service exists for exactly this.

If you design customer experiences

Retail, hospitality, transport, galleries and government service centres will increasingly meet customers who navigate and read with glasses. Map those journeys deliberately: the entry, the queue, the screen at the counter, the payment terminal. Our customer journey mapping work with people with lived experience of disability will show you where those journeys break.

Advice for individuals choosing glasses

We are not a product reviewer and we do not take commissions, so here is plain advice, especially for anyone considering glasses as assistive technology:

• Avoid the unbranded budget tier for anything private. If a pair costs less than a good pair of headphones and you cannot find who makes the app, assume your data is not protected.
• Pair the glasses as soon as you switch them on, and turn them off when you are not using them, so there is no window for someone else to connect.
• Read where your data goes. If the privacy policy does not name the countries your voice and images are sent to, treat that as a warning.
• Talk to the specialists. Vision Australia, the Royal Society for the Blind, Guide Dogs and hearing services run demonstrations, and can help with NDIS funding conversations for the more expensive options.
• Keep using what works. Glasses are another tool, not a replacement for a cane, a dog, an interpreter or a screen reader. The best setups combine them.

The bottom line

Smart glasses are not a gimmick for the people we serve. They are reading the mail, finding the door and catching the joke in the meeting. That is worth protecting, loudly, while the country decides what to do about the people who misuse them.

But the worst products on the market are a real danger, and the danger falls hardest on the people with the most to gain. The answer is not to choose between access and privacy. It is to demand both: enforce security standards on the sellers, regulate conduct rather than devices, and make sure disabled people are in the room when the rules are written.

If your organisation is writing a smart glasses policy, buying assistive technology, or building something these glasses will need to read, we would be glad to help you get it right the first time.

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Sources

• ABC News, Smart glasses are giving blind and deaf people more independence, 13 October 2026.
• ABC News, Ultra cheap smart glasses leaving Australians' personal data exposed to hackers, 22 September 2026.
• GadgetGuy, Smart glasses sales skyrocket despite privacy fears, 23 September 2026, reporting Counterpoint Research and IDC data.
• 9to5Google, Smart glasses are only getting more popular, 22 September 2026, reporting IDC and Counterpoint market share figures.
• Be My Eyes, Be My Eyes on smart glasses.