The problem

The morning briefing is one of the strongest habits in news. But it assumes you're holding a phone with your eyes and hands free. A lot of mornings aren't like that: you're walking, commuting, making coffee, or you're a Deaf reader for whom "just listen to the audio version" was never a real option. NYT had no wearables team and no wearables mandate. I wanted to know what the paper's most reliable daily product feels like when it lives on your face instead of in your pocket.

What I built

A working briefing app for smart glasses. Wake it up in the morning and pick how you want your news:

Read it. The briefing arrives as glanceable cards sized for the glasses display: headline, one or two lines, next card. No scrolling a phone screen strapped to your eyeball, just short units you can take between sips of coffee.

Hear it. The same briefing, narrated. Eyes stay on the sidewalk.

Watch it signed. The same briefing delivered in American Sign Language, on the display, as a first-class mode sitting right next to the other two.

One briefing, three doors in. You pick the door that matches your morning, or your body.

Three modes, one briefing

The design rule I held myself to: every mode gets the same news, the same day, with no mode treated as the discount version. That sounds obvious and mostly doesn't happen. Audio versions of text products usually lag. Accessibility versions usually cover a subset. Here, the card copy, the narration, and the signed delivery all come from the same briefing content, so choosing the ASL mode never means choosing less news.

The cards themselves were their own design problem. A glasses display gives you a sliver of real estate and a reader who's mid-task. I wrote the card layouts around glanceability: one idea per card, big type, hard character limits, and a token system so spacing and type stayed consistent across every screen instead of being eyeballed per card.

The ASL mode

This is the piece I care about most. For Deaf readers whose first language is ASL, written English is a second language and audio is nothing. The standard industry answer is captions, which is text again, which misses the point. The Everyday News Paper treats signed delivery as one of the three primary ways to take the briefing: it's on the mode picker, not buried in a settings menu.

I'm not Deaf, and a hackathon prototype built by a hearing engineer is the start of this conversation, not the end of it. But the argument the prototype makes stands: on a new hardware platform, you get to decide on day one who the product is for. I decided the answer includes Deaf readers, and I made the code agree.

Designing for a screen you wear

Glasses are not a small phone. Nobody wants to fix their eyes on a display for three minutes straight, so the briefing is built for interrupted attention: every card survives being the only card you see, narration works with the display ignored entirely, and the whole briefing is short enough to finish before your train comes.

Why I built it

Nobody asked for this. I'd led design for a smart-glasses companion app earlier in my career, so I knew what the hardware could do, and Maker Week gave me the excuse. I built The Everyday News Paper on my own time as part of a four-prototype smart-glasses suite, and had all of it deployed before Maker Week officially started. It's listed on the official Maker Week 2026 demos sheet.

What I'd tell another designer

Put the accessibility mode on the main menu before you build anything else. If ASL had been a stretch goal, it would have been cut the first time I was behind schedule, which was always. Because it was one of the three modes from the first sketch, cutting it would have meant redesigning the product, so it survived. Where a feature sits in your information architecture is where it sits in your priorities.