September 2021

Consulting on a variety of projects, launching a collection of spices, looking toward launching a line of cocktails (the company will be called Blind Truth), and serving as a volunteer for more than one organization—the sum of all these parts certainly affords Wedler plenty of room for bragging rights. But bragging is not in his quiver of arrows for success.

Over the past several years, the San Francisco LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired has become more and more involved with the creation and production of tactile graphics. At the heart of these efforts is the Media and Accessible Design Lab (MAD Lab), a group of highly skilled people with lots of amazing equipment who create and produce a variety of tactile graphics and other accessible media.

Amazon Prime Video is a full-featured service with apps that are accessible to users with visual impairments. There is an enormous amount of content available on Amazon, with more being added on a regular basis. Amazon is expending resources to harness the latest technologies to bring a massive amount of high-quality audio description to users with visual impairments.

Wouldn't it be great if our smartphones were really just that, smart phones? So you could just have a conversation with the phone to add a contact, choose something to listen to on YouTube, or get a ride from Uber. The Louie Voice Control app for the Android phone is taking this conversation to the next level, literally, by working with some of the most popular apps, like YouTube, What's App, Contacts, and Gmail.