Connecting Dots: Dr. Josh Miele on Innovation, Accessibility, and a Life Without Limits 

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VOICEOVER: Connecting Dots: Dr. Josh Miele on Innovation, Accessibility, and a Life Without Limits. Speaker: Josh Miele, Author. Moderator: Ned Desmond, Founder and Former Executive Producer of Sight Tech Global

NED DESMOND: Thanks, Sight Tech Global. Uh, hello, everyone. My name is Ned Desmond and I’m really happy to be here today. Sight Tech Global’s very close to my heart because I launched this project back in 2020. I couldn’t be more proud of all the great conversations about blindness, tech, and accessibility that we’ve spun up on this platform since then. I’m also really pleased by how the Vista Center has carried this project forward since I stepped back last year.

Today, I’m really deeply honored to lead a conversation with our very special guest, Dr. Josh Miele, about his fantastic memoir, Connecting Dots: A Blind Life. Before we get started, let me provide a brief bio of Josh and his truly remarkable journey. Josh is a blind scientist, community leader, and inventor with a history of developing innovative information accessibility solutions for blind people. In 2021, Josh was named a MacArthur Fellow for developing devices to enable blind and visually impaired people access to everyday technologies and digital information. Currently, he is a principal accessibility researcher at Amazon, where he helps guide the non-visual customer experience for device accessibility, and advises widely across Amazon and, on inclusive design and research methods.

Josh’s work integrates disability-inclusive design, accessibility engineering, disability studies, and other disciplines. Prior to Amazon, Josh worked at Smith-Kettlewell Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Blindness and Low Vision, leading a team of engineers and scientists dedicated to addressing accessible information challenges in education, employment, and entertainment.

Josh holds a bachelor’s degree in physics and a PhD in psychoacoustics from University of California at Berkeley. That is an incredible curriculum vitae, but it barely scratches the surface of the life you’ve led, Josh. It’s great to be here with you.

JOSH MIELE: It’s, um, uh, thank you, Ned. Thanks so much for, um, for being here and, and for kicking off, uh, in 2020. I remember, I was there when you, when we started, and it’s such an honor to be here, um, in conversation with you. Thank you to the Vista Center and to Sight Tech Global for, uh, the opportunity. This is really, really cool. Thank you.

NED DESMOND: Yeah, likewise. I, I’m so excited to be here with you. But let’s start with the memoir. So it’s 1973 and you are a four-year-old living happily in Brooklyn when a terrible incident leads to awful burns on your face and the loss of your sight in a, and a really harrowing medical odyssey, and you might think that-

JOSH MIELE: Yeah, so-

NED DESMOND: … that’s the story, hold on, but it’s not.

JOSH MIELE: (laughs) It’s not the story at all.

NED DESMOND: Yeah. The story is about this very determined, scientifically-inclined kid without sight whose life is all about discovery and getting where he wants to go. At the very start of your memoir, there’s a recollection that captures this perfectly, and I’m gonna read it. It’s about a five-year-old who’s blind and he’s rollerskating on a sidewalk in Brooklyn, pretty much heedless to the hazards around him and completely absorbed in echoes. Let me read this passage.

“They were heavy things with metal wheels and spring-loaded mechanism that clamped over your sneakers. Another family friend gave them to me. It was easy to adjust them and put them on before ranging around the first floor, clattering past the round table and along the terracotta tiles in the kitchen. My mother stopped me. She was sure I’d damage the tiles. She told me to go rollerskate on the sidewalk. The skates clattered even more on that uneven surface of bluestone and cracked concrete, each joint between the rectangular slabs providing a new jolt. I turned right in front of the house and headed downhill. I used my white cane to tap or touch the wrought-iron railings and brownstone stoops and planters in front of the row houses, which were similar but certainly not uniform.

Each way, each was off a slightly different design. Each one was a little higher than the one next to it, and the different things and front yards jutting unevenly out into the sidewalk. Then I noticed something. I could hear the echo of my rollerskates. I could hear the ambient sound bouncing off those railings, planters, and stoops coming back to me, and when it did, I could hear how close I was to them. Even the difference of a few inches was easily discernible. When my skates clattered in s- front of a stoop, I heard a series of echoes, one after another in lightening succession. I didn’t have to hold on for guidance. I could use my ears. I could go up and down the block in a straight line.

I didn’t think, ‘Wow, I’ve discovered something.’ I just thought, ‘Hmm, I can hear where the planters and railings are and I can tell whether I am too far or too close. I can hear inanimate objects.’ That was echolocation, although at the time, I didn’t know what it was, nor did I know that the rapid-fire echoes bouncing off the stoop steps were called flutter echoes. I just thought, ‘Oh, that’s useful.’ I wasn’t surprised, not at all, but everyone else was. In fact, the neighbors were freaked out. They couldn’t wrap their minds around the idea that this little blind burn kid was rollerskating up and down the block and could hear auditory cues. That’s when I realized something I’d be reminded of again and again. I can do things sighted people thought I couldn’t, even though it’s really obvious to me. If they put on metal rollerskates and closed their eyes and ripped down President Street, they’d surely discover it too, but why would they? They could see. They didn’t need to listen and pull out every last bit of information from those echoes. I needed to pay attention to things that other people weren’t noticing.”

That’s such a great passage, Josh.

JOSH MIELE: Thanks. Thanks, Ned, and thanks for the great… Hmm. Thanks, uh, for the great reading there. Um, so you started out with, um, you know, the, the, the fact that I was burned and blinded as a, as a young kid, and that is a brutal little story. Um, but it’s, it’s really, you know, it’s, it’s an easy place to get stuck. And I appreciate that you sort of, you focused on the roller skating because what, um, you know, what I was focused on was not m- how I got burned and blinded, but how I was going to do the things I wanted to do and roller skating was (laughs) definitely at the top of, of the list.

Um, and I’ll, I’ll say, you know, I noticed, I noticed, uh, the echoes and found them very useful very early on as a kid. They helped me roller skate, they helped me in my ONM. Um, echolocation is not magic. It is not something that only special, you know, people can do. Anybody can do it. Anybody who pays attention to what they hear can do it. You know, if you’ve got, um… You know, some people, of course, are probably gonna be better at it than others but, um, but a- I’ve, in my experience, um, almost everyone who, uh, travels independently with a cane or with a guide dog, um, uses some level of echolocation.

NED DESMOND: And Yeah, I’m sure that, i- it’s, it’s, yeah, it’s one of the remarkable things you learn when you interact with folks who are using a cane. It’s, it’s still stunning to me. I, I, I don’t think the rest of us can hear all that well.

JOSH MIELE: Yeah.

NED DESMOND: But when you, when you decided to write the memoir y- the way you did, Josh, I, it feels to me like you had a, you had a mission in mind, you know. What, what, what was really stirring you to, to, to write this in the first place?

JOSH MIELE: Well, the subtitle of the book, it’s, it’s called, um, you know, uh, Connecting Dots: A Blind Life, and really the, one of the things that I wanna make sure folks understand is that, um, it is just a blind life. It is not, um, the blind life. It is not… I’m not trying to, um, be a, uh, an exemplar for everybody, but I, I was, it was, um, it was useful to me, um, to learn a bunch of stuff as a young and, you know, young blind person and then an older blind person going through the world. I learned an awful lot of things, and, um, thought about an awful lot of things. And I’ve, um, I thought that they were worth sharing with others and the thing that I was the most scared of in putting this to paper was writing another blind memoir that was gonna rehash the same stuff that, that blind memoirs have been rehashing, um, for, for a long time.

There are many memoirs out there and many cool blind people who’ve, who’ve told their stories in books and I didn’t wanna just add another one. So, it was really important to me to, um, to focus on blindness identity and my, my journey of becoming aware of the fact that, um, blindness was cool and that I was, uh… I didn’t have to hide being blind, I didn’t have to be ashamed of being blind. That I could in fact take pride in, uh, my blindness and the skills that I had developed, uh, as a result and the work that I had to do in order to be, um, to be good at being blind.

And I wanted, um, because there is so much… (clears throat) Because there is so often, uh, shame associated with disability and blindness, um, it’s really important to me to let people know that I lead… (clears throat) I’m so sorry. (clears throat) It’s really important to me to make sure people know that I lead what I call a blind first existence. I am not a person who happens to be blind, I am a blind person, father, scientist, researcher, et cetera. Whatever else I am, I do as a blind person and I… there’s no way to do it any other way. Blindness impacts-

NED DESMOND: (laughs)

JOSH MIELE: … everything I do and I’m, I’m, uh, I’m proud of that fact and don’t wanna minimize it.

NED DESMOND: And- It, it comes through so strongly in the book-

JOSH MIELE: Yeah.

NED DESMOND: … Josh. I mean, really. Mission accomplished there. And, you know, one, one of the questions that, you know, that surfaces… We’re gonna jump further down in your life, uh, pretty quickly here, but I just wanted to ask before we do that, you know, there were so many remarkable people in your early days of your life. There’s this… Your, your stepfather, Klaus, who was a scientist and, and your early teacher, Wilhelmina Ellerbee who, who, uh, pounded out, uh, things for you on the Perkins Brailler, and then, uh, this very persistent teacher of yours, Joan Smith, who taught you to type. You know, it’s, it’s I kept wondering, who is my favorite character in your life that (laughs) helped, helped you get down the road because, you know, by your own admission, you weren’t the easiest kid around to work with.

JOSH MIELE: (laughs) Uh, and, uh, I just wondered, you know, looking back on it, what, what or who made the biggest difference to you in the long run?

NED DESMOND: Oh, man. That would be impossible to-

JOSH MIELE: Yeah, I figured it would be an impossible…

NED DESMOND: (laughs) … really… But, you know, the thing, the thing that I think is really important, um, to underscore is that y- you don’t do anything that’s worth doing by yourself. Um, anything that is valuable is almost invariably the result of collaboration and encouragement and support from a community and a family, and, um, I am just… The, the reason I have been able to achieve what I have achieved, um, is because I am lucky enough to have had the support and encouragement of an amazing set of family, friends, mentors, teachers, um, and, and, you know, friendly rivals.

Um, there’s, there’s, there’s so many, there are so many people that have, um, pushed me to, to do the things that I’ve done and helped me do the things that I’ve done. Um, you know, the technologies I’ve created, I have not created by myself. I’ve created with teams of people who were, um, collaborators and contributors and, um, invaluable, uh, workers in getting, getting things done. And so, um, you know, Joan Smith, you mentioned Joan Smith as… You know, she was my, uh, TVI, a teacher of the visually impaired.

She was my dedicated teacher from the time I was in third grade to the time I was in 12th grade. She, she brailled every…… piece of every handout I ever read, she brailled. Every piece of homework I ever handed in in braille, she wrote into print. There weren’t, there weren’t the kinds of… Uh, you know, we couldn’t use computers, we didn’t have computers to do stuff in the, in the early 80s and late 70s when I was a student, um, in, you know, elementary and high school. (clears throat) And she, um, she was not only dedicated, but she was hard. She would not let me phone it in. She would not let me slide. She would not let me-

NED DESMOND: Yeah.

JOSH MIELE: … just kind of go along to get along. She made sure that I pushed myself, and when I didn’t push myself, she pushed me, and it was super annoying. But I have her to thank not only for the encouragement and support, (clears throat) not only for the encouragement and support, but for all of the incredible work, all of the, the braille, all of the tactile graphics, all of the recorded, um, the recorded stories that we couldn’t find on, you know, that were alre- to, on RFBND. Um, she did all of that. And-

NED DESMOND: She’s remarkable, a remarkable figure.

JOSH MIELE: Yeah.

NED DESMOND: I mean (laughs) really something. I mean, s- people… Such dedicated educator, remarkable. Uh-

JOSH MIELE: A successful blind kid doesn’t come out of nowhere.

NED DESMOND: Eh, uh, well, it’s true of all kids too, right? So the, um, well, you know, there are interesting series of threads in the story that begin in your youth and carry through into your adult life. For instance, you know, your PhD at Berkeley is in psychoacoustics, which probably somehow ties back to your interest, early interest, in echoes. But another big one is tactile maps, um, and, uh, maps that people could under- can understand with their fingertips, and-

JOSH MIELE: Mm-hmm.

NED DESMOND: … there’s this great little passage, a shorter passage, uh, at this time, uh, where you write about visiting, um, your, your stepfather’s, um, uh, workplace, which was the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. And, uh, you noticed the maps on the walls. These were three-dimensional maps made from thin vacuum molded plastic in which geographic features like mountains, valleys, and rivers were represented by raised or depressed areas that I could feel, that I could see with my fingers. It was heaven when I could conscript any passing grad student or scientist into reading the labels. I spent hours with both hands and all ten, ten fingers engaged and actively feeling my way around some of the world’s most distant and geographically compelling corners.

And then years later at Berkeley, you invented a way for blind people to use a braille printer to print out neighborhood maps called TMAP. Can you tell us about that and, and why it was such a big deal and, and what it really unlocked for you?

JOSH MIELE: So TMAP stands for Tactile Maps Automated Production, and I, I have always loved maps, that, that experience at Lamont with the, um, you know, these relief maps showing mountains and valleys and river gorges and shorelines and deserts and lakes. I mean, it was so amazing, but those were mainstream products, right? Those were, those had visual, you know, things printed on them, and the relief part was really just for fun. It was like, it didn’t, it wasn’t intended for blind people. It was just, uh, a thing.

And, you know, I had seen maps of, you know, the United States, like where you’ve got a raised line for the state boundaries, you know, I, I had those, had it in school, and that was, that was really great. But I… What was missing from my childhood was, um, a way of seeing maps of neighborhoods. I, you know… The map of the United States is great, but I’m, you know, I’m not walking to Florida. I’d really like to know how to get to the 7-Eleven or to, you know, to school or, um, my friend’s house.

And so maps for way finding were really in, that were accessible to me, that I could feel, were missing completely. And one of the things that I, I’ve always wanted was the ability to, um, get a map of any place I wanted so that I could see how the streets connect, I could see the shape of the intersections, I could feel, um, you know, where the dead ends were and so on. And so, um, that was one of my first projects that I did after, after I got my PhD. It was, um, one of my first postdoc projects was to develop TMAP and, um, I, I used a, um, you know… This was back in maybe 2003 or ’04 that I started the project, and finding the data, the street, you know, the street map data for it was, um, perhaps one of the hardest parts.

I, I did find the right data, um, first with a, an open source, uh, dataset from the, uh, from the Census Bureau, and then later, um, Mike May and the Sendero Group gave me access to the data that they were using for their early GPS tools. And, um, and we used that data to create a standard m- a standard model or a standard design for a street map anywhere, and created an interface that would allow any blind person who had access to the web and a braille embosser to go to the website, specify the map they wanted in using text, uh, means. So you would type in the address of the place you wanted, you would, uh, tell it how big the paper would, was that you’re gonna use, you would tell it what scale you wanted, and you could then download and emboss a printer-ready file of a map of the place you wanted.

And it was really, um, it was just an incredible experience when I was designing and developing this thing. So many times I…… really got, uh, just shivers down my back because of the, coolness of what was, what was going to be available for people. And I’m just, um, I’m so thrilled that it’s still available. The San Francisco Lighthouse is, uh, still producing, uh, T-map… uh, T-maps-

NED DESMOND: That’s great.

JOSH MIELE: … for anybody that wants them. You can look on the Lighthouse website and order a T-map if you want.

NED DESMOND: Incredible. Incredible.

JOSH MIELE: Any place in the world.

NED DESMOND: Well, you know, another interesting thread in the book that, um, uh, uh, played itself forward for you was movies. Uh, you know, that was another huge influence on you because you had such a great time with your movie-loving mom and your sister Julia and her friends going to the cinema in Flatbush. So another short passage.

JOSH MIELE: (laughs)

NED DESMOND: Uh, “I could discern from the various crashes and guffaws of other audience members that something really funny had just taken place. I’d laugh right along with everyone else, but blanks needed filling in. Dialogue needed context, and my mother and Julia provided that. They’d tell me who was doing what and how. The back and forth between them came naturally. It’s not as if one said to the other, ‘Okay, it’s your turn.’ They just ran on instinct. Sometimes they’d whisper, sometimes not so much, and inevitably, we’d be hushed by someone sitting nearby. My mother would snap, ‘He’s blind.’

The thing that those narrations… uh, about those narrations was that they were tailored specifically to me. We were always a family with a lot to say. Everyone got into the habit of describing this or that. They enjoyed it, and we’d race to be the first with an especially apt or comic description. But we also used shorthand because my family knew what I was interested in, and I already knew what I liked.”

So years later, another amazing invention, you know, comes to the surface from, from your lab called You Describe, uh, which is narrations tailored specifically for me. Uh, you know, could you, could you give us a little bit of sense-

JOSH MIELE: Sure.

NED DESMOND: … of the origin story and also, you know, play that forward in terms of how this has influenced audio description and, and how AI is now starting to sort of, uh, uh, take center stage in audio description?

JOSH MIELE: Sure. I don’t know about center stage, but sure. And, and before we do that, let, let me just say audio description for those who don’t know is the, uh, the tool that is used for making video accessible to blind people, and it’s, you know, you can think of it as being, uh, somewhat like captions. Captions make the audible part of a program accessible to people who can’t hear the audio, and audio description makes the visual parts of the program accessible to people who can’t see the visuals.

So, um, unlike, uh, captions which have a very definite sort of right and wrong, you just… if you do the transcription right and if you place the, the, um, transcript in the right place and have the timing right, you’ve done it right. Audio description, on the other hand, requires a lot (laughs) of judgment and a lot of editorial decision-making because there’s so little time to describe so very much. And I think that my experience in the movie theater as a kid in the ’70s was not unique. I think any blind person who, uh, w- you know, has gone to the movies before we had audio description available to us in, um, you know, in a variety of, of mechanisms, anybody knows that the way you accessed a movie was by poking your friend in the ribs and saying, “What the heck is going on?”

NED DESMOND: (laughs)

JOSH MIELE: And, um, my sister and my mom would sit one on either side of me, and they would sort of talk into both (laughs) my ears. And sometimes I would have to say, “Shut up, I gotta hear the movie.”

NED DESMOND: (laughs)

JOSH MIELE: Um, but, you know, they, they would, uh, they would provide running commentary on what was, what was going on. And yes, we would often get yelled at by other people in the, in the theater. We were a noisy bunch. Um, and, uh, and I’ll also say that, that, you know, that kind of, uh, that kind of visibility and taking charge of the accessibility that you need, um, and not really… Um, you know, it’s nice to be quiet if you can, but, but you’ve gotta, you know, you gotta know what’s going on on the screen and, um, and sort of… That’s a, that was an early model for self-advocacy for, for me.

NED DESMOND: Mm-hmm. Interesting. Yeah.

JOSH MIELE: Um, so rolling forward to, um, to You Describe, um, we now have, um, access to more described video than we have ever had at any time in the past. Um, we have, we have streaming platforms that have audio description readily available. We have, uh, audio description available in movie theaters. And while it may not always be convenient or easy to get access to, and the audio description may not always be perfect, we have, um, we have this expectation of audio description that we’ve never had before. Now, we’re focused on getting good audio description rather than just getting audio description at all.

And when I created You Describe with my team at Smith Kettlewell in, um, you know, 2012, 2013, um, uh, area, we created this platform. So You Describe is a web-based platform that allows anybody, anywhere to add audio description to any YouTube video and share that description with everyone, and it does that all without violating the terms of service of, of You Des- of, of YouTube. So, (clears throat) so basically, it, uh, it allows a describer to watch a video and record descriptions in sync with the video, and then those descriptions get re- those recorded descriptions get, uh, stored elsewhere. And then when they watch… when somebody else watches that same video on You Describe, those descriptive clips are resynchronized with the original video still playing direct from YouTube.

So, um, so it’s really, it’s not changing the original video, it’s just annotating it. It’s just adding extra information. And so it means that you don’t have to go to the person who created the video to get permission, uh-

NED DESMOND: Right.

JOSH MIELE: … because you’re not changing anything. You’re just, um, you’re just adding information that is being stored someplace completely different. And I love…… that we were able to do this. Um, and it’s a totally different model for audio description than, um, the standard model of, you know, you, you, you make a movie, you send the movie off to be described by a professional, uh, uh, a professional production house. Uh, then, you know, whoever’s streaming the video, you get to, you can turn on the audio description if you want, but there’s only one option, right? There’s only, it’s, it’s only that very professional, uh, level of description, hopefully.

And, um, and very often, you know, especially for stuff on YouTube, you don’t need a professional describer. You just need someone to describe it. And, uh, the other cool, one of the other cool things about YouDescribe is many different people can describe the same video. So you might have, you know, 10 different descriptions for the same video, and one of them might be, uh, you know, let’s say it’s a, it’s a, uh, a cartoon, one might be recorded by a mom, one might be recorded by a, a brother, one might be recorded by a friend, one might be recorded by a, a teacher of the visually impaired and et cetera.

And all of these, um, descriptions are going to be slightly different. And I love the idea that, um, audio description is an art, and unless you allow people to play with the medium to experiment and, um, and try new things and allow the ability for different voices to be part of the description, um, narrative, if you will, that’s, um, you’re not going to be, uh, you’re not going to find a great height of that art. You’re restricting the art. You’re restricting what people can do with it. And with YouDescribe, anybody can do it. Anybody can experiment with description. And there’s of course, a rating system. So if you (laughs) –

NED DESMOND: Yeah.

JOSH MIELE: … if, if you don’t do a very good job and people don’t like it, they won’t give you very many stars. Um-

NED DESMOND: (laughs)

JOSH MIELE: … but, uh, but it enables other people to figure out which describers have done a really good job and, um, and focus in on those descriptions.

NED DESMOND: Yeah.

JOSH MIELE: So, uh, audio d- I’m very passionate, obviously about audio description.

NED DESMOND: Yes.

JOSH MIELE: Access to video is really, um… You know, for so long we focused on access to text, and we thought, oh, you know, video description or audio description is just a, um, you know, that’s, that’s just, that’s extra. That’s a luxury. That’s not gonna help anybody get a job. That’s not gonna help anybody get a PhD. But of course, that’s m- not only is that not true, um, people do need access to video and to, to get jobs and to, um, have equal access to education, but access to video for fun is critical. If you’re not participating in the same, um, social and, and, you know, um, entertainment opportunities as everyone else, you’re a second-class citizen.

So, um, I, that’s why I talk about, you, you read a, um, that’s why I like to talk about the three Es.

NED DESMOND: Yeah. Yes.

JOSH MIELE: Uh, education, employment, and entertainment.

NED DESMOND: And entertainment.

JOSH MIELE: Yeah.

NED DESMOND: And entertainment, right? We’re running a little low on time, Josh. And maybe I should, I should jump to my next question, which is, uh, you know, in, in ’21, you received the MacArthur Fellowship, which is an incredible honor, and it’s helped you move forward with a- another project you call the Center for Accessibility and Open Source, uh, which i- uh, acronym sounds a lot like chaos. Uh, I don’t know if that’s the idea, but-

JOSH MIELE: It doesn’t just sound like chaos. The acronym is CHAOS.

NED DESMOND: (laughs) What is the center and, and why is it important?

JOSH MIELE: Well, I don’t think we have time to dive into all of it here, but I will say that, um, open source software and hardware is an engine for economic equity and, um, and equal rights all over the world. People use open source in order to, um, do the things they want to do. And people with disabilities need equal access to those opportunities. In fact, one might argue that people with disabilities are, um, in even more need of access to those opportunities than most. And so, um, unfortunately, uh, it, the open source, uh, world is still, um, has still not sort of woken up to the fact that accessibility and disability inclusion are critical aspects of, um, of equity.

And so, the, the Center for Accessibility and Open Source, or CHAOS, is dedicated to, um, promoting disability inclusion and accessibility in open source communities. And we have a, a bunch of different ways that we’re going to do that. Um, but CHAOS is a, um, we’re, we’re just starting up as a 501 (c) (3) . It will be an international organization, and, um, I, uh, I’m really thrilled to be collaborating with a bunch of other people on, um, open source accessibility, including, uh, folks at GitHub, folks at, uh, CREATE at the University of Washington, folks at Berkeley.

Um, accessibility to open source is a, is a, a real, um, a very exciting issue, and one that has not received quite enough attention yet. And while you might think that there are, uh, organizations that already do this, there aren’t. There are organizations that care about disability and that care about open source, but there are none that make, um, open source accessibility their main mission. And that’s what, that’s what CHAOS is doing.

NED DESMOND: Great. Great. Well, thanks for that explanation. So I have a one question lightening round. Um, looking 10 years down the road, Josh, what’s the most fantastic thing that will be available to the blind and visually impaired?

JOSH MIELE: Um, I think probably autonomous, uh, space station, uh, landing craft.

NED DESMOND: (laughs)

JOSH MIELE: Well, 10 years, 10 years is an eternity, Ned. I, I, I have no idea where things are gonna be in 18 months-

NED DESMOND: Yeah.

JOSH MIELE: … let alone in 10 years. I, I think that, um, clearly as computers become smaller, more, uh, you know, uh, more powerful and less expensive, the kind of computing that we now need to access the cloud for will be available on personal devices, um, without the latencies, without the, um, uh, the constraints that we think of today. Um, and of course, uh, that will open up incredible opportunities for accessibility for people in, in all kinds of ways, autonomous, uh, all sorts of, uh, autonomous vehicles, au- autonomous guidance systems.

Um, uh, I think, you know, braille teaching, I think will, uh, be, uh, strongly facilitated by, um, by, computers in the future. But, um, but also, of course, these, you know, these exciting possibilities come along with, uh, real challenges, challenges to privacy, uh, and challenges to, uh, to personal, you know, personal freedom. So, uh, we are, we are at, you know, everybody knows we are at a, a, a an inflection point here where, um, AI is becoming ubiquitous and it, it’s incorporated into everything we do. Accessibility is no exception.

And of course, just like everyone else, we have to be very careful about how we do it or not only, uh, might we do it wrong and have, uh, uh, tools that aren’t as good as we, as they should be or as we deserve, but, um, we may, uh, corner ourselves in ways that we, uh, can’t yet predict. So I, um, I encourage real care in the way we use, um, we use AI, uh, for accessibility.

NED DESMOND: I’m completely with you there, Josh. We’ve got to be careful about all this. And unfortunately, we’re out of time. I just want to say on behalf of, uh, Sight Tech Global, thank you very much for joining us. It’s a real honor to have you today, and I’m now holding up your book again. So-

JOSH MIELE: Connecting Dots: A Blind Life.

NED DESMOND: … Connecting Dots: A Blind Life. Get it at your local bookseller, Amazon, wherever you can get it. It’s very worth it. Thanks again, Josh. And of course it’s available on Bookshare and all those other places as well.

JOSH MIELE: On Bookshare, of course. Thank you, Ned.

NED DESMOND: That’s right. Thank you, Ned, for an incredible, uh, conversation. And, um, it’s always too short, but, um, but I look forward to the next time.

JOSH MIELE: Thank you.

NED DESMOND: Thank you.

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