Episode Notes

In this month’s episode of the AccessWorld podcast, Aaron and Tony talk with Dr. Joshua Miele, who shares his life’s journey and work making the world more accessible for people with disabilities. A MacArthur Fellow and design scholar, Dr. Miele has played a key role in designing some of the leading breakthroughs in digital inclusion over the past three decades.

Last month, Dr. Miele published his memoir, Connecting Dots: A Blind Life. And in this episode, we learn how Dr. Miele’s passion for science and exploration took him from the tree lined streets of his boyhood home in Brooklyn, to the leading technology labs of Berkley, California. It’s a story that goes well beyond the world of accessible design, unleashing that problem solver that sits restlessly inside all of us. To learn more about Dr. Miele’s book and his current work on digital accessibility, visit his site at: www.MieleLab.com.

About AccessWorld

AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). Published each month, it is a companion to AccessWorld magazine, now celebrating its 25th anniversary. Aaron Preece serves as the publication’s editor-in-chief, and Tony Stephens leads communications for AFB. Together, they take time each month to speak with leading voices for digital inclusion and accessibility. Be sure to like and subscribe to AccessWorld, and visit www.afb.org/AW to read the latest online issue of the magazine and browse through over 25 years of back issues, all completely free-of-charge.

To learn more about AFB, visit us online at www.afb.org and consider making a tax-deductible donation to support our work as we create a world of endless possibilities for people who are blind or have low vision.

This podcast is powered by Pinecast.

AccessWorld Podcast, Episode 18 Transcript

Intro (00:00):

AFB, you are listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind. Learn more at www.afb.org/aw.

Aaron Preece (00:39):

Hello everyone. Welcome to the AccessWorld Podcast. This is episode 18 and I am here with my cohost Tony Stephens and a guest of ours today. So I'll pass it over to Tony for introductions.

Tony Stephens (00:52):

Thanks Aaron. Hi everybody. And it's exciting. We're at episode 18, so that means our podcast can now register for the selective service, I guess at this point in our life. We're excited today with our guests that we have because he covers an enormous range of experience, both as someone with lived experience himself, but also just on the developing side of the arc and history around accessibility. And really few people we have a chance to talk to that sort of have their ear to the pavement, if you will, on the future direction and where accessibility is going. But we are so excited to welcome to this episode of the AccessWorld Podcast, Dr. Joshua Meile. Josh is at Amazon, is an Amazon design scholar. I think a lot of folks in the accessibility space and AVID readers of Access world already know Dr. Meile. There's so much to talk about, not just in your book that came out in March, which is an exciting read that Aaron and I both have thoroughly enjoyed, and we're talking about that, connecting dots and the wonderful metaphor that exists in that. But just in reading through the book, the dots you connected through your own sort of rise into science and exploration in terms of this world called digital inclusion and accessibility. But seriously, thanks so much for joining us today and give us a sense of where you're at right now. You're all the way on the other side of the coast from where Aaron and I are.

Dr. Joshua Miele (02:20):

Yeah. Yep. It's super cool to be here. Thanks for inviting me and thanks for saying nice things about my book. I'm really glad you enjoyed Connecting Dots. Subtitle is a Blind Life and that's what I sort of tried to put into it. I'm over here actually, I'm in Seattle right now. I work at Amazon. At least one of the hats I wear is I am a design scholar at Amazon and I'm sitting in an Amazon conference room right next to the Spheres in Seattle as we speak. So yeah, man, it's wonderful to be able to connect with the Access World community and with you all to talk about connecting dots and kind of the blind life I've been privileged to live. It makes me feel old to say it that way.

Tony Stephens (03:19):

We're close to the same age and I feel you because you're booked has such a wonderful arc of really, I mean the experience of your own personal story, but as someone who's blind as well, just that arc of what life was like in the 1970s through the eighties and when you got really involved in the nineties with your profession and began to grow in that space. Everything that's changed. I can't think of a better place to be nested right now than Seattle. The Northwest is such a dreamy part of our country. Just every time I've gone to Seattle, it has that sort of air of just a perfect place to harness kind of the creative soul, which is why there's been such great innovation out of there, both with Amazon and all the other tech folks out there. So can't think of a better place to be talking to you right now. Thoroughly, like I mentioned, pleased by the book. We'll have a link for folks that want to check it out. I assume you can get it on Amazon. That's a silly question to say.

Dr. Joshua Miele (04:17):

Yeah, it’s available on Audible if you want to listen to it. And it's also available on Kindle. Bookshare has it, and I'm told that NLS should have it. If not, by the time this podcast is available, it should be available pretty soon.

Tony Stephens (04:33):

Awesome. Well, let's jump into the book and the story. It gives a sense of your life and your harrowing story of just overcoming enormous challenges as a young child with the results of a really tragic, tragic experience that you had that's pretty much lived with you your entire life. That was the result of your blindness. I'll encourage folks to read the book to find out all the details in that it's extremely descriptive and very heart moving for anybody that's page turning or scrolling, listening to voiceover or whatever app you're listening to it on or using Audible. But one of the things that's incredible is just having a chance to talk to someone who has really risen to the ranks. You're a MacArthur fellow, which is an enormous recognition in the science and sort of research community. Congratulations on that. That was in 2021, I believe.

Dr. Joshua Miele (05:30):

Thank you.

Tony Stephens (05:32):

But we and, sort of using little air quotes, the blind biz in the world of blindness and advocating and working to try to expand opportunities for people for employment and things like that. You in your own journey came up in a time when not everybody who had a disability, particularly people that were blind, were sort of fed into the science technology, engineering, mathematics into that space. What's great about the book is you really lay out sort of the seeds that were planted for that share with us a little bit about, as someone who has worked all the way up through the doctoral level and postdoc kind of the seeds that planted a passion and a desire for all things science technology. There's such great pieces in the book about the crystal radio building kits. I remember those as a kid as well and things that really just sort of sparked a curiosity towards just kind of the mind that an engineer would take on to tackle the problems of the world.

Dr. Joshua Miele (06:36):

Yeah, man. So there's a bunch in there that I want to kind of unpack with you. First of all, you mentioned how I became blind, which is I'll just sort of a quick synopsis is that I got burned as a 4-year-old with sulfuric acid and before that I was a little sighted kid and after that I was a burned blinded kid and went through life as such and you mentioned tragic and it's overcoming, and honestly, that was not how I sort of perceived it, and I think that that's key to how I have lived my life. There are lots of ways to be blind. There's as many ways to be blind as there are blind people. I'm a nerdy curious kind of a little bit too loud person, very interested in science and how things work and wanting to get my hands on things and do things, and that's just kind of who I am and who I was.

(07:52):

So when I became blind and burned, I just wanted to keep doing that. I was not really interested in being blind. I was interested in doing cool stuff and I happened to have to do it as a blind person. So that's kind of what I started as. So I just brought that natural curiosity and strong motivation to be in it, to do it, to just be a kid, to explore, to run, to play, to be obnoxious, to play tricks on my parents and all of that. And that's who I was. And I was lucky enough to grow up with parents who were able to cultivate that, who didn't try to crush me into a blind kid mold and say, they didn't say, oh, you can't do that. You're blind. Oh, be careful. Oh, don't run. Oh, don't roller skate on the street. You're going to fall and hurt yourself.

(08:55):

Nobody said any of that. And part of it was being a kid in the 1970s when the culture was both quite open to kids doing whatever, and also the parents were so distracted by their own concerns that a lot of parents just weren't really attending to the kids in the seventies. And I was both a victim and a beneficiary of that because I feel like as a blind kid at that time, I really benefited from the lack of supervision because it taught me to be a self-advocate. It taught me to be curious and to do things for myself and to figure things out for myself. It also got me into quite a bit of trouble. I talk in the book about how I also got pretty heavily involved with drugs as a teenager and which also could have been a very bad thing, but luckily I feel was also educational.

(09:59):

So they say whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger. And I think that that's basically luckily what happened to me. There's a bunch of, not just lack of supervision, but also sort of strong cultivation. My mom always kind of encouraged me to check stuff out, to do things, to duck under the ropes at the museum and feel the sculptures when the guards weren't looking. And my stepfather, who was a geophysicist, introduced me to science and explained things to me and didn't ever think that because I wasn't able to see that I wasn't able to do the things I wanted to do and because they never introduced those concepts of questioning or that I might not be able to do something, it didn't even occur to me that I might not be able to do stuff. I just did it.

Tony Stephens (11:00):

It's such a powerful thing that you shared. I think a lot of parents, I had somewhat of an opposite where my mother was very overprotecting of me, and we hear that a lot in the case and just hearing about that free reign, the seventies, I think for anybody that grew up in the seventies included, there's a great passage description in your book where you talk about writing in the station wagon and back in the days when being thrown in the back bench without even seat belts, no one knew what seat belts really were. That idea of the seventies was blind or not. I think for a lot of people growing up at that time in that era, it was just kind of part of the culture.

Dr. Joshua Miele (11:40):

Yeah, no, it was serious squid and whale time in our house.

Tony Stephens (11:45):

That's a perfect image of that for folks at the movie Squid and Whale, which actually takes place in the neighborhood. You grew up in Brooklyn.

Dr. Joshua Miele (11:51):

It does. Yeah. No, that is pretty powerfully evocative of growing up at that time in that place.

Tony Stephens (12:00):

You mentioned your stepfather and that was something that I think a lot of people that have been successful talk about the role models in their life. The people that have opened doors of curiosity didn't say, no, you can't do this. Definitely you really paint just a wonderful relationship between you. And Klaus was his name. Am I correct in that? Yep.

Dr. Joshua Miele (12:25):

And he's still around. Yep. Klaus is his name even.

Tony Stephens (12:28):

Yep, yep. Still Klaus. But just in that sense of the role model, talk a little bit about that power of role models that you had and then moving from Klaus to when you went west, when you went off to college for going to UCal, Berkeley, university of California and Berkeley, and just a sense of that power of role models and how that played a part in Malcolm Gladwell writes about the 10,000 hours, but there's always these people on the way that really help open the doors for us to give us that 10,000 hours

Dr. Joshua Miele (13:00):

For sure. And we've got Siri and Alexa and we've got all these things. You can always just ask a question now or you can go to Wikipedia and get an answer back in the day, getting information, learning about stuff, you had to go to the library, you had to do a bunch of research. It was hard to get answers to the questions that you had that I had as a kid about science, about technology, about how things worked. And especially as a blind kid, a lot of sighted kids have, they can look in the encyclopedia or whatever. I didn't have access to that, but what I did have was a scientist who lived in my house. My stepfather was extraordinary at answering all the questions that I had, and there were a lot of them. Everything from how do radios work to how do you do decimal multiplication and things like why is the sky blue kind of stuff. And when you have a patient interested and generous person like that living in your house, you learn a lot as you go. And I tell the story in connecting dots about how he would bring me to work.

(14:34):

He would introduce me to his colleagues and his graduate students and one of the things that they had at his lab were tactile maps, not for blind people, but relief maps, just sort of vacuum formed relief maps of all sorts of places in the world that were just tacked up on the walls because it was a geophysics institute and they just had lots of maps. They had lots of non tactile maps also. But it was just one of my first introductions to geography because blind kids don't have good access to maps. And that actually became a theme in my future work in accessibility. One of the things that I've done is a lot of work in accessible mapping and tactile maps and tactile graphics. You asked about when I went to Berkeley, so I went to college, I was mainstreamed in New York City schools and then in Rockland County where I moved when I was about nine, so third grade-ish.

(15:39):

And I always wanted to study physics. Physics, not always, but in high school I realized that physics was really cool and that if I had questions about the way the universe worked, that physics was the thing I wanted to study. So UC Berkeley had an amazing physics department. They had an element named after them. There's helium, which is a highly radioactive, unstable element, interestingly enough. And so they had an element, they had a great physics department and it was in California 3000 miles away from where I grew up, and nobody knew me out there and I loved that. I loved all of that. And so I wanted to go somewhere where nobody knew who I was, nobody thought they knew my story. Nobody had assumptions about when you grow up in a place since third grade, a lot of the kids around you sort of have narratives about you.

(16:41):

And I wanted to get away from all that. So I went to Berkeley and it was amazing to land in a place I thought I was going for the physics, but I wound up landing in an amazing community of blind people, which I had never had before. I didn't grow up with blind people around me. I didn't even really think of myself as blind. I wasn't, I mean, I knew I was blind, but I wasn't like all the blind people I read about in books or on tv. So I figured I was the only one who was different, who was sort of not this typical ableist picture of blindness, which is what I of course had grown up thinking that blind people were, even though I wasn't. And when I landed in Berkeley with a bunch of really cool, amazing, smart, funny blind people who also didn't conform to the classic stereotype of blindness that were all sort of unfortunately fed from history, literature and popular culture, I was just completely away because I realized all of a sudden that blindness and disability were actually not something to be minimized or ashamed about or hidden or set aside that actually we were actually cool as blind people and that we had an identity as blind people and a history.

(18:10):

And it was just an incredible revelation that I think a lot of kids get when they go to college, a blind or gay or engineers or whatever your flavor of the month might be that you thought you were the only one of you go to college and suddenly you find your people and that's what happened to me. And so I went from being a person who didn't want to be thought of as blind to a person who really embraced blindness and the identity of disability and just recognizing that that was a way to be in the world and that it was something to be proud of.

Tony Stephens (18:55):

You give great homage in a sense in your book because Berkeley is sort of that icon city of inclusion where everyone can kind of wear their differences with pride and it's also the birth of the independent living movement. You talk a little bit about that. Was that kind of a culture shock coming from places like New York or north of New York City where there wasn't necessarily, I mean New York City has its own chair of really solid advocates over the years. I mean, Helen Keller was at B for decades, of course home base for years, but Berkeley is, we were talking about Seattle being a nesting ground for thought. Berkeley was sort of that nesting ground for just really for the disability movement at large across the world Institute of Disability and groups like that based out of that area around the bay. Was that a culture shock in that sense?

Dr. Joshua Miele (19:49):

It was a revelation. It was revelatory, it was mind blowing and it was just delightful. So I mean, I had no idea about the disability rights movement. I had no idea about the free speech movement. I had no idea that Berkeley was sort of a progressive liberal place where everybody's freak flag could fly with pride. All I knew was that they had a great physics department and they had an element named after them, and it was just dumb luck that I wound up in a place where I could so thoroughly dive into disability identity in a place where it was the eighties by the time I got there. So it was late eighties. All of the disability rights stuff was really popping off in the seventies, so it was like a decade earlier, but it was still raining in the air. It was still everywhere. People with disability. Disability was part of the fabric of what Berkeley and UC Berkeley were all about, and it was mind blowing for a kid. That came from the context that you were talking about, like New York City and suburban New York where if you're different, you're an object of ridicule. It was such an amazing awakening and breath of fresh air to find myself there. I came for the physics, but I stayed for the disability identity.

Aaron Preece (21:31):

It's interesting to see the parallels and experience and the differences in how either life experiences or the techniques people use. One that stood out to me was with your guide dog and the decision you made to be a cane user and how you preferred that and having a similar experience getting a guide dog in college and basically making the opposite choice after I lost my first dog, going I can't stand using a cane. I got to go back. I got to get another guide dog. But just seeing just kind of a little bit of a stream of consciousness here, but basically compared to you may meet blind people in your daily life or you're at events or you might have friends and that sort of thing. But I think something, this is more of a comment on books and memoirs in general, having that experience of getting to see someone's life, see how, where you don't really get to see people like you as often, at least in my experience, and know how they came to be where they are and seeing those commonalities and differences and how that led people down different paths is interesting to me.

Tony Stephens (22:52):

Yeah. If you would've gone to MIT, would it have been the same?

Aaron Preece (22:56):

Yeah, same completely different atmosphere I imagine.

Tony Stephens (23:00):

Course would've taken into this accessibility space, even feeling empowered to sort of try to give that to the world of just being an engineer that has really spent the past few decades really focused in heavily on accessibility.

Dr. Joshua Miele (23:15):

And I mean the things that you, sometimes you're shaped by the things that you intentionally do by choosing a major or a course of study or an internship, and sometimes you're shaped by the accidental things that just that you happen into. And for me, I feel like, man, if I had gone to MIT or some other school where there was no disability community and no disability, consciousness and identity, I would've come out as a completely different person and I would not have wound up working on accessibility. I would've ended up in aerospace, which is what I thought I wanted to do. And I am so grateful for the kind of accidental encounters and realizations that happened to me along the way. When I first started as a student at Berkeley, I definitely did not want to do anything related to blindness or disability. I wanted to go into space science, I wanted to build spacecraft and scientific instruments and do space science and study planetary physics and stuff like that. And I explicitly did not want to go into what I thought of at the time as the disability ghetto of careers around disability and accessibility. It was like, well, I would only do that if I couldn't make a real career, is what I thought.

(24:56):

And I am just so lucky that I wound up at Berkeley with that community and even while I had that idea about not wanting to be in a disability related career, I did wind up as a student job. I was working at a company called Berkeley Systems, and it was a student job. Berkeley Systems made the first screen reader for a gooey computer. They made a screen reader for the Mac that came out in 1989. It was the very first screen reader that let people use a point and click mouse driven visual interface. And I thought that job was cool because I was like, well, I'm going to need to use these computers. It's kind of great to be able to work at this company that's making this software so that I can be really good at using this kind of computer. And I thought it was just a student job.

(26:02):

And it turns out that it was actually my first accessibility job, and I realized ultimately by choice, I certainly could have made a career in physics, but I realized that I was a blind person with deep insight as it were, into what blind people needed in the tools that we use for science and not just for science, but in every day. Whereas most of those tools like screen readers and braille devices and stuff were really being designed and built at the time by sighted people, by well-meaning very smart sighted people, but they didn't always meet the needs that I was identifying as a blind person. And I realized that I could really do something cool, special and challenging by going into this field and working on the accessible technology that all of us need and use to do the things that we want to do.

(27:06):

And hopefully I'm making it easier for some other kid in the future to go into physics, to go into space science, to go into the careers that they want rather than the disability career that I chose willingly. But I chose it because I felt that if I didn't do it, the job wasn't going to get done. And hopefully we're creating a world where that job is increasingly being done right, because more and more people with disabilities are engaged in the technology field and we have to do that. If we weren't doing it, it wouldn't be done. And I feel like I'm super grateful that I did wind up in this career because I need these tools as much as anybody else does.

Aaron Preece (28:00):

Your description of the calls you would get at, I think it was at Smith kettlewell with the inventions that people would come up with that were completely not really solving a completely imaginary problem that the person had just come up within their own mind at a FB back in the day. I used to field a lot of the similar kind of calls and it was totally could empathize with that having a similar experience.

Dr. Joshua Miele (28:28):

I mean, bless their hearts sighted people want to help, but knowing what that help is in order to help, you need to know what help is needed. And a lot of the time, well-meaning inventors who are cited don't do the research that needs to be done to understand what help really means in the context of blindness and the way that needs to be done is they need to hang out with blind people. They need to talk to blind people. They need to understand what the real problems are as opposed to the imaginary problems that are based not on actual blind lives, but on fictional blind lives that they see in the movies and read about in books, just like the imaginary Blind lives that I was misguided by as a kid, not realizing what real blind people were up to and all the cool things that we do do and can do

Tony Stephens (29:30):

With Amazon. When you went through that interview process, were they the right time for those ears to be listening and be like, you're right. We need to have this lived experience really sort of guiding at the hand of where technology is moving to sort of create solutions for our

Dr. Joshua Miele (29:47):

Community. This work is never going to be done. The work of accessibility and the work of explaining to non-disabled people about the disability experience and how technology and systems can be made more accessible, we're just going to have to always be doing that. It might get easier to explain that people might get more basic education about disability and design in college in the future, but it's an ongoing effort When you build a house, it doesn't just stand there forever. You've got to maintain it and you've got to improve it. And the accessibility house is, we're getting it into good shape, but it needs a lot more work. And it was an amazing experience at the time because I was coming from a research career at Smith Kettlewell in San Francisco where I was designing stuff like T Map and you describe and all of my work on audio tactile graphics and maps, and I really wanted to scale that work.

(31:07):

I wanted to not just do things that a few hundred students would find useful. I wanted to do stuff that thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or the blind community on a global scale, which Amazon certainly has. I wanted to be able to make life more accessible for Amazon customers, and I thought that was an amazing thing to aim for. And then when I sort of came to Amazon to Lab 1 26 for the interview to talk about how I imagined accessibility at a big company like Amazon could be, it was incredible because all the people that I was talking to, they also agreed that things could be better, needed to be better and should be better. And that the way to do that was to bring more and more people with not only lived experience, but the design experience and the engineering experience that people like me. And I have another blind colleague, mark Mulcahy, who works with me at Lab 1 26, and he's an engineer, he's a principal engineer in device accessibility.

(32:36):

He's brilliant, and he's the one who made the level star icon and worked on the Braille Plus and did a lot of work on Orca, and I think he was, was at Blasey Engineering back in the day. Mark is just an absolute genius. And so people like me and Mark being in the world where mainstream devices are being made more accessible at places like Amazon, that's what we need. And to have a bunch of cited and non-disabled colleagues at Amazon recognized the importance and potential impact of folks like us to be working on accessibility. They were as excited about it as I was and I was like, man, I want to be here doing this.

Tony Stephens (33:36):

Well, great. About when you were talking a minute ago about economy of scale, but also too, just thinking about the convergence of the consumer technologies and the innovation that's been sort of fed through that. I think of the first time I ever came across an Alexa device, and I think mine just kicked on in the background, but my father-in-law had this little thing and it was great. He could listen to his audible books and things like that. The second time I came across the device was at the California Council of the Blinds State Conference outside LA and at the convention hotel, everybody was bringing them to their rooms and logging into the wifi, and it was just sort of this idea that here's a consumer device that just fits so well into the ecosphere of someone who was blind or just anybody that relied on audible sort of sensory.

(34:35):

You don't need to be blind, but I mean, people use these functions in so many parts of their lives that are perfectly able bodied, but it just translates so well. The same way that we're recording this a week before this drops here in Washington dc Waymo just announced today in Washington that Waymo's coming to Washington DC and it's like the driverless car conversation that we've had that I remember Eric Bridges our CEO when he first went to Google well over almost 15 years ago to check out that first idea that we might not have cars that fly, but the idea of driverless vehicles was an enormous kind of space that could fill a major problem in our community the same way that just access to information now is so much easier to get thanks to these devices that have scaled up. They're super affordable, not so much the a Waymo, Jaguar car right now is probably not super cheap, but as things progress, things will come down in cost and as things scale out. But a little bit about your thoughts on that sort of idea of this convergence where these consumer devices and the innovation that lies in Lab 1 26 or with other developers around the world to really sort of leverage the internet of things. That was a huge talking point when all this technology was sort of bursting at the seams.

Dr. Joshua Miele (35:59):

My philosophy about accessibility in mainstream companies like Amazon, Google, apple, like that, of course, big tech needs to make sure that what they build is accessible. So it's important for things like voiceover on Apple devices or voice view on Amazon devices, or it's important to have accessibility features on devices. It's important to make sure that the web offerings that companies have work well with screen readers. But actually, I think that the biggest deal about disability accessibility and design for companies, for big tech is to create things that are useful for everybody and desirable for everybody, but to lean into their applications for accessibility. And I think Alexa, as you brought up, is a great example of something nobody was thinking about disability or blind people when they made Alexa, they were just making a cool mainstream product that you could talk to, and yet look what happened.

(37:21):

It turned into this incredible thing that blind people have. We love it, we benefit from it, it's super usable and people engage with it. Blind people engage with Alexa in a way that is difficult to imagine. Before we had a tool like that, the same thing is true of online shopping, right? Amazon does online shopping, so that's amazing. Everybody likes to be able to order something and have it delivered to their house. But for blind people for whom transportation might be a challenge or for whom shopping in a brick and mortar store is a hassle or undoable man, being able to shop online is transformative. Same thing with streaming media or I think about things like you mentioned Waymo, but self-driving cars are great, but I am blown away by things like Uber and Lyft. Ride sharing was not invented for blind people, but it has been completely transformative for our independent travel. And I think that the best model going forward for real accessibility and equity for blind people and people with disabilities is to build cool stuff for everybody and make sure that it works for everybody, including people with disabilities. Because there's a good chance that the thing that most people find cool and useful will be really life-changing for people with different types of disabilities, including blindness.

Aaron Preece (39:18):

One thing I remember is when the Kindle app became accessible in 2013, it was right after I graduated in the following years, I was so envious of all the college students that now had access to such a well done book reader and so many books that you could just go and download. And it's now anytime with book clubs and various things, I can just assume that there'll be a Kindle book available and I can go get it right then if it's a day one release type of thing. And that was, for me at least, a major game changer. I do what most of my reading now is through Kindle Unlimited and things like that with self-published authors. But man, I remember being so jealous of the students now that can just - because we had some accessibility, we had Bookshare and you have Learning Ally and that kind of thing, but man, the ease of use now and the broad access to all the different books people have.

Dr. Joshua Miele (40:12):

Yeah, I mean a lot of the time people talk about curb cuts, like, oh, the curb cut is sort of this emblematic technology of something that was invented for people with disabilities, but winds up being amazing for everybody, and that is really cool and that does have power. But actually, I mean, the thing that I was talking about a minute ago, I call Tuck Brock, which is curb cut spelled backwards because as cool as curb cuts are, it's even more amazing and even more powerful to have things that were designed for the mainstream that wind up being transformative for people with disabilities. And I think Kindle is a very powerful example of what I call a Tuck Brock, and we should remember that as cool as things are getting as much access as we have to information and transit and shopping and all of that, the more technologies that get invented, the more sort of accessibility work we have to do.

(41:21):

Even as we win accessibility battles from our past, we were constantly being presented with new challenges in the future. Every new technology that comes out VR for example, this is again something that we have to figure out how are we going to make this accessible? It's cool for people. A VR helmet is really cool if you can see, but those experiences are not being designed with blindness in mind or with deafness or with any number of other disabilities. And so as the world continues to innovate, so we must continue in accessibility to innovate and be creative about how we design accessibility around these emerging new technologies.

Tony Stephens (42:15):

Well, as easy as we can be free, it's just as easy to break it and then suddenly we're stranded again.

Dr. Joshua Miele (42:20):

Yeah.

Tony Stephens (42:22):

For sure.

Dr. Joshua Miele (42:23):

You are one regression away from not being able to use the ride share technology that you have come to rely on.

Tony Stephens (42:30):

Yeah, I think during the pandemic, we experienced that just with the surge of online shopping. I mean, it was something that was enormous in New York City, like Fresh Direct was the company a couple decades ago when it came out and I could suddenly get my groceries that didn't have to go find someone to help me at a local pathmark at grocery store and get the things I needed. But then when the pandemic rolled around and the whole world came on and it kind of socially broke the system because suddenly everything was just out back, all the constraints that happened with that, I think our community particularly faced a lot of that hardship during the pandemic because suddenly the system itself, not necessarily the technology, but the system itself kind of ended up turning up on its belly and really sort of showed us like, wow, when these things kind of break on a larger grand social scale, how much that can really impact our freedom.

Dr. Joshua Miele (43:27):

And I think that's one of the things that I'm really trying to do with this book, this memoir, connecting dots. I think that it'll be helpful for blind kids and parents of blind kids and blind parents, blind kids and teachers and all of that. I do think that it will have, I hope that it will have a positive direct impact on the experience of young blind people, but even that's just one audience. I'm really hoping that I don't just want to help blind people. I want to help sighted people. I want to help them think more deeply and more reflexively about disability and design, want to sort of, and there's a lot in this book, not just about my life, but about the technologies that I worked on, the design philosophy that I have and the approach that I take to designing and building technologies that are accessible and that make things easier for people who are blind and disabled. And the real change in the world comes not from building cool technologies, but from changing minds so that the minds that you change and sort of connect with can think differently and more openly and creatively about the technologies that they're going to build, about the systems that they're going to create, the classes they're going to teach, the et cetera, et cetera. So the effort really is to shift the conversation away from wouldn't the world be a better place if to, how do we do it?

Tony Stephens (45:30):

Well, it's such a great job in connecting dots of blind life that you really laid out in that sense, thinking back to your early recollections of stories about the monkey bars your father installed, that created a spirit of adventure, the innovation in that to also be therapeutic and you're healing because of the burns

(45:52):

That just the idea of the spirit of by being blind, we have to put our hands on things. It's a hands on life. The innovations and the whole dots that you connected from each chapter really leads to that spirit, that this isn't a book just for people that are blind, maybe someone that know someone's blind. I mean, it's a great story for all of us that do want to live nostalgically through the arts that we've had of outspoken and things that are going on now in this world and talking book players and things like that. But it really does speak to, I think, a broader sort of spirit of just overcoming the problems in society across any gamut, and then how we can do that just by sort of charging forward with the spirit of innovation and wicked s smartness. For someone that didn't go to MIT,

Dr. Joshua Miele (46:44):

I don't want anybody to think this is my model for how blind people should be or grow up. One thing that really always irritates me is that just because you're a smart blind kid doesn't mean you should go into STEM or engineering or whatever. You should be able to do whatever the hell you want, but it shouldn't be that you don't do some career because you think you can't. And so creating the technologies that allow us to do the things that we want to do is just creating the option. As I said, man, there's so many different ways to be blind and so many things to be interested in, and I want blind kids, blind young people and people coming along behind us to have more options. I want them to do the things they want to do, whether that's STEM or being a barista or being an entrepreneur or an artist or whatever floats your boat. I want people to be able to do it and have whatever the technology is that's going to make it possible.

Tony Stephens (48:05):

Well, definitely way to leave things. Go ahead, Aaron.

Aaron Preece (48:07):

I was going to say, I feel like it's great to see the diversity in other people, and I might've talked about this a little bit earlier, but to see the diversity in someone else's life and kind of see both the commonalities that you have with someone and potentially how you might have a commonality and experience or with the technology you use or something, but you came to different conclusions or made different decisions based on that, and then the differences you might have with someone and how you may have had the same outcome from different experiences and still came to the same place. So I think it's good to see, like you said, that you can as a smart blanket, you can go into STEM or you can go whatever else. I mean, I went into history, but I think that's powerful and just the diversity within a minority like blindness, if that makes sense.

Dr. Joshua Miele (49:04):

Yeah, absolutely. I totally agree. And like I said, I want people to be able to do the things they want to do, not to be forced into a particular career because they think that blindness prevents them or is a barrier to them going into the field that they want or love. Of course, I also want to encourage people to go into sustainable careers. I think if you're going to be an artist, I hope there's a plan for self-support in their somewhere, but the arts are how we express ourselves, and I want to be supportive of broadly expressive blind artists who are talking about the blindness experience and their own experience. And whether you're an artist or an accountant or a lawyer or a historian or an engineer, there are tools. There are technologies that will make your life easier and make you better able to engage with the things that you love.

Tony Stephens (50:20):

Awesome. Well, Josh, thanks again for just really bringing this book to our listeners, sharing a little bit about it, sharing a little bit about your story, but also two, just sharing a sense of a direction we all can take, right in the sense of one, not taking can't or no as a final ruling on anything, but just really just helping us all connect the dots in life. So thanks so much for everything you're doing, and thanks for being on the podcast.

Dr. Joshua Miele (50:53):

Such a pleasure. Thank you for inviting me, and thanks for such a great wide ranging conversation. I know there's always more to talk about, and I look forward to sitting down with you and chatting about the stuff we didn't even get to. So we, and I guess I'm going to be at the AFB Leadership Conference.

Tony Stephens (51:14):

Yeah, we'd remiss to not mention that, but you're our keynote for the AFB Leadership Conference November 12th through the 14th in Crystal City, right next to HQ two for Amazon, so folks can find out more about that on our website, any of the stories, things that have been written about Josh or any of this stuff that's kind of following the arc of accessibility and all the breakthroughs, check that out as we're celebrating our 25th anniversary for AccessWorld this year at afb.org/aw. Feel free to visit afb.org for anything else that we're working on. Is there a place where folks can go, Josh, for you to try to learn more about you or the book?

Dr. Joshua Miele (51:52):

Yeah, I do have a website. It's mielelab.com. It's M-I-E-L-E-L-A-B dot COM. And you can get in touch with me there. You can find my social media accounts there and learn more about the book and the other projects that I'm engaged with.

Tony Stephens (52:14):

We can't wait to have you head east and then we'll all learn out at the Leadership Conference. So thanks again, and everybody, thanks for listening and we will talk to you next month.

Outro (53:26):

You've been listening to AccessWorld, a podcast on digital inclusion and accessibility. AccessWorld is a production of the American Foundation for the Blind, produced at the Pickle Factory in Baltimore, Maryland. Our theme music is by Cosmonkey, compliments of Artlist.io. To email our hosts Aaron and Tony, email communications@afb.org. To learn more about the American Foundation for the Blind or even help support our work, go to www.afb.org.

Outro:

AFB.