Josh Miele demonstrated an extraordinary brand of maturity when, at age 11 or 12, he told his family to let go of the grief and anger they were all experiencing over the sulfuric acid assault that had burned and blinded him at age four. There had been multiple surgeries to attempt restoration of his badly burned face and even remote hopes of vision restoration. However, the young and uncommonly wise Miele was finished with the past and with wasting time in hospitals. He announced that there would be no more surgeries. He was blind, and his face would always look different. It was time to accept the status quo and move forward.
There would be other strikingly mature and perceptive decisions along the path that has led Dr. Miele to a central role in researching and developing methodologies for people who are blind or visually impaired. As a principal investigator for the Smith-Kettlewell Institute in San Francisco, his work encompasses a variety of projects, each of them having at its core the goal of enhancing and increasing access to the world around us for those unable to do so through the sense of sight:
- How do you deliver a picture that a blind person can understand, revealing how those crazy streets and intersections converge and diverge in your neighborhood? Make a simple, uncluttered map that you can "see" with your hands.
- How do you make braille notes anywhere atany time without schlepping a wagonload of equipment everywhere you go? Wear gloves that enable you to write braille on anything anywhere and, subsequently, send that text to your hardware device of choice.
- How do you watch a movie with your kids or sighted spouse and not bug them to find out who is chasing whom? Develop a cloud-based,crowd-sourced database of verbal descriptions that anyone can access when the need arises.
These are some of the kinds of questions (and answers) populating Josh Miele's typical workday, but how did a little boy who trustingly opened a gate for his neighbor and, subsequently, almost died from the vicious attack of acid on his head get to this intellectually vibrant place in his life?
Early Years: New York City
Growing up in New York City offered certain advantages. Miele attended public school, learned braille, received early training in using a white cane for mobility, and had a lot of freedom as a child to run, climb, and explore. His mother's passion for art mingled with love for her son prompted her to encourage him to sneak under the ropes and touch priceless creations in museums thus adding to his ever-expanding mental database for perceiving the visual world. He took violin lessons at the Lighthouse International in New York for a time but, like many six and seven year olds, hated to practice and eventually quit. Music theory classes, on the other hand, captivated his attention.
In the seventh grade, he made a new friend, Brian Schachter, who played piano. Although their musical passions were quite different (Miele favored Jefferson Airplane and the Beatles, while Schachter was wild about rap), they formed a musical connection. Together, they wrote some songs with Schachter crafting the melodies and Miele the lyrics, and they played at making their own recordings. Miele would sing and wire up the soundboards, and Brian would write music, play piano, and recruit more peer musicians. They formed a band. Bass players kept leaving them, however, so one day Miele picked up the bass, too. He says he didn't practice that instrument much more diligently than he had the violin, but he continued to play. Today, Brian Schachter, who Miele still describes as a best friend and "a real musician," is musical director for a Jewish meditation center, Chochmatut it Halev,in Berkeley, CA, and Miele continues to play bass for the center's musical component.
Despite being part of a band and having his own small circle of fabulous friends, Miele had another of those prescient moments when the time came for choosing a college. There was only one place he wanted to go: California. Yes, there was partially the draw of a long distance friendship he'd developed with a girl there, but his certainty was much deeper than that. He just knew that California was where he belonged, perhaps where he could fully become just Josh Miele and not the kid who was blinded and burned in a freakish split-second assault at his own front gate.
His sense of what he wanted to study was equally clear. A lover of all the sciences (biology, chemistry, and more), physics, he says, is at the bottom of everything. "It is the science of the world, of the way everything works in the world," he says, and he wanted to immerse himself in understanding it. He applied to more than one school, but it was his acceptance into the University of California at Berkeley that launched the next chapter of his life.
Before going to college, though, Miele followed what would reveal itself to be a somewhat misguided perception on his part. While growing up, he had more than a little disdain for people who are blind as a group. He was intellectually and culturally savvy and perceived those who are blind as being far less so, even maybe somewhere out on the fringes of what constituted "cool." Still, he had a pragmatic sense of his own differences as a person who is blind. He knew that braille and finding your way around, for instance, are essential blindness tools. With that knowledge came his assumption that training with a guide dog was "just what you did," what every person who is blind had to do in order to function independently in a new environment.
Accordingly, in the summer following high school graduation, he went to the Seeing Eye and trained with a guide dog. He and his new dog headed for Berkeley where Miele would experience a kind of cultural conversion.
Blind Pride
He didn't know much about disability rights before his 1987 arrival in Berkeley and certainly didn't know the powerful scenes of the disability rights drama that had been enacted in real life on that very turf. The irony was that he had long been fascinated by civil rights and the 1960s counterculture, and says he spent a lot of time wishing he'd been born in 1955 instead of 1969. Having been drawn to California, he hadn't really known what all awaited him there, but it wouldn't be long at all before his spirit was singing (consciously and unconsciously), "This is where I belong."
At the heart of that joy in relocation was his immediate acquaintance with amazing and talented people who were blind. Where his life in New York had blatantly excluded those who were blind as potential friends because he hadn't yet encountered many with whom he sensed a common ground, Berkeley was teeming with kindred spirits who were blind. Previously shunning blindness, he was now embracing it, immersing himself in the already established and "tremendously cool" blind community. As he puts it, poking just a bit of fun at his own young awakening, "I got blind pride!"
The dog turned out to be one of the few of his decisions that was less than accurate. After three years of living in Berkeley (and discovering that he had been in error when jumping to that younger conclusion that a guide dog was part of the grown-up blind package), Miele concluded that he wasn't really a dog user at heart. Happily, his dog was retrained for someone else.
A Scientist's Interest in Access Technology
While earning his degree in physics, Miele went to work for Berkeley Systems, a company whose flagship product was outSPOKEN, the first screen reader for Macintosh computers. The work he was doing there felt more important than school, so he actually left school for some time.
Eventually, though, he was so passionate about access technology and the research that would affect those who are blind that he made another of those perceptive decisions to put himself where he truly wanted to be. "I wanted to be sure that I would have a voice of authority when it came to research and development in accessibility," he says, "and I recognized that everybody in the field whose thoughts were considered of note held higher degrees."
He returned to school and finished his bachelor's degree in physics. He did an internship at Smith-Kettlewell where he says Bill Gerrey was a significant mentor to him. It was Gerrey, in fact, to whom Miele turned for advice when he found himself at an academic crossroads.
Berkeley Systems was sold in 1996, and Miele concluded that he had two clear choices for next steps: he could start his own company or work toward a PhD. The question he asked Gerrey was whether or not getting some sort of policy degree was a wise choice.
The gist of Gerrey's reply was, "Why would you waste your time? You're a scientist! At least get a degree in experimental psychology."
Indeed, the degree that now appends the PhD to Josh Miele's name is in psychoacoustics and couldn't be more perfectly suited to his work and passion. Psychoacoustics examines how we hear and interpret what we hear. Miele's primary doctoral work was focused on auditory motion perception, how hearing enables us to perceive the direction in which a sound is traveling and how fast the sound is moving.
In 1998, Miele was a summer intern at Smith-Kettlewell. Later, he was there under a pre-doctoral fellowship and, in 2003, for a post-doctoral fellowship. His connection to Smith-Kettlewell was akin to the one he had experienced earlier for Berkeley itself: this was where he needed to be.
Moving Forward
Today, Josh Miele still lives in Berkeley with his wife of 12 years, Liz Ruhland, and his children, Benjamin, 10, and Vivien, 8. He is president of the board of directors for the San Francisco Lighthouse, is more connected than ever to that "cool blind community" in Berkeley, and has a one-hour commute to and from work at Smith-Kettlewell.
Typically, Miele says, he invents things because he personally needs or wants them. His first project at Smith-Kettlewell a dozen or so years ago was a good example. In his graduate work with auditory motion perception, he used a data analysis and data visualization tool called MATLAB. "It's sort of like Excel on steroids," he says, displaying data in multiple dimensions. He needed it,but it wasn't accessible. He developed tools for taking the bar charts and other graphic information displayed in MATLAB and presenting them in auditory and tactile formats.
Tactile maps, smart pens, and crowd-sourced video description head the list of the projects and tools exciting him most at present, and each of these will be featured in more detail in upcoming AccessWorld articles.
"I find existing tools and pull them together, adding an interface that will render something accessible which has previously been inaccessible to people who are blind," Miele said. He does this with imagination, intellect, and creativity. He does it because he wants an even greater accessible claim on the world around him,for himself and all his friends who are blind or visually impaired.
For more information, visit the Smith-Kettlewell site.
