A Blind Inventor’s Life Of Advocacy And Innovation

In “Connecting Dots: A Blind Life,” inventor Josh Miele recounts his life story and path to becoming an accessibility designer.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:17Ira Flatow?

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• 0:51Flora Lichtman?

  This is Science Friday. I'm Flora Lichtman. Today in the podcast, a conversation with blind inventor Josh Mealy about his fight to make the world more accessible.

• 1:00Speaker 03

  I would rather do it and get in trouble for it than live in a world where we just accept a lack of equal access to information for blind people.

• 1:14Flora Lichtman?

  When inventor and scientist Josh Mealy was four years old, a neighbor poured sulfuric acid on his head, which burned and permanently blinded him. In his new book, called Connecting Dots: A Blind Life, Josh chronicles what happened afterwards, growing up as a blind kid, and how he built his career as an inventor and designer of adaptive technology. Now, Dr. Joshua Mealy is an Amazon Design Scholar and MacArthur Fellow, aka Genius Grant recipient. Josh, welcome back to Science Friday.

• 1:45Speaker 03

  It's so wonderful to be here. Thanks, Flora.

• 1:47Flora Lichtman?

  This is a personal book. You tell your story, you know, your family's in it. Why did you want to write it?

• 1:54Speaker 03

  That's a great question. My work is all about technology and accessibility and raising awareness of blindness and disability inclusion. And I think I just realized that writing a book would be a really powerful way of connecting with people who, number one, may not have any exposure to accessibility or disability. And number two, of course, I really want to be part of encouraging

• 2:23Speaker 03

  People who have disabilities to think more deeply about the technology that they use, the rights that we have, the way that we interact in the world and the opportunities that that we all have and that technology either allows us to have or gets in the way of having.

• 2:39Flora Lichtman?

  Let's talk about your family. You write that your mom and your family never left you out of anything because you couldn't see. You all went to the movies and your mom or your sister narrated. Your mom brought you to museums. Can you talk a little bit about this?

• 2:53Speaker 03

  When I was a child, nobody said to me, you can't do this because you're blind. Everybody always said, let's figure out how you're going to do this as a blind person. My mom was actively, and the culture around me, my family, my teachers, was actively saying, you need to do things, like encouraging me to do things like, you know, yes, I would go to museums, but my mom would take it the extra step and say, okay, the guard's not looking now. Duck under this rope and feel this sculpture. The subversive nature of DIY accessibility, not only self advocating, but taking the the extra step to do what you

• 3:38Speaker 03

  have to do, whether it's against the rules or not, to get the the access you need in any given context. And my mom was, not only was she willing to do it, she kind of sought out opportunities to to break the rules in order to get me the access that I needed. And as a child, of course, I was horrified by it. I was, you know, I didn't, I didn't want to break the rules, but of course, it was hugely important in building the the skill set and the attitudes that I have as an adult.

• 4:12Flora Lichtman?

  Such as?

• 4:13Speaker 03

  You know, for example, one of the things that I created was an audio description platform called You Describe that lets anybody in the world add audio description for accessibility for blind people to any YouTube video. And while it doesn't violate the terms of service of YouTube, there's a real gray area there. Like, are we really allowed to? Annotate somebody else's material. But my attitude about it was, I don't actually care if it's legal or not. I, I think people need this kind of access and I would rather do it and get in trouble for it

• 4:53Speaker 03

  than live in a world where we just accept a lack of equal access to information for blind people.

• 5:02Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, similar to your mom.

• 5:04Speaker 03

  Just like my mom.

• 5:05Flora Lichtman?

  What about in school? I mean, you know, as a sighted person, I think of science and math often as visual, like equations, diagrams, watching chemicals change color in a beaker. How did you adapt the course material into something that you, you could engage with?

• 5:24Speaker 03

  There are a number of, of ways in which I interacted with science. And I, of course, learned Braille at a very early age. Braille is a huge tool for blind people who need to be able to write equations or write or read in, in all sorts of ways. And so I was super lucky to have a teacher who was able to transcribe all my stuff into Braille, my math, my science, my English, and all of the work that I would do in Braille, she would then take and, you know, with a, with a pen, just write, transcribe on the paper what I had written for my classroom teachers.

• 6:06Speaker 03

  So, you know, it's a lot of work, but that's the kind of work that was at the time needed to, to really educate a blind kid in math and science. You know, it's really interesting that you would say that math and science are visual because of course that's the way most people do experience them. But when you're blind, uh, my experience of math and science was not visual. Of course, it's very spatial. When you have a chart or a graph or an equation with a ratio or something like that, but. If you represent them by touch, they're still spatial.

• 6:46Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  The information is still there and you can still interpret it by touch.

• 6:51Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Speaker 03

  So it's really, it's not about vision, it's about space.

• 6:55Flora Lichtman?

  That distinction between visual and spatial is so helpful. Thank you.

• 7:00Speaker 03

  Of course. And when you don't have all of this visual input, our brains are capable of doing so much non-visual processing, in part because we're not, you know, the brain is no longer being inundated with all this visual information. But we don't, most of us don't bother with it because vision is so useful.

• 7:19Flora Lichtman?

  So you grew up in New York and you had your heart set on Berkeley because it had a good physics department. You got in and you quickly learned about the cave. Tell us about the cave.

• 7:30Speaker 03

  When I grew up in New York, I, of course I was blind, but I didn't embrace blindness. I didn't know any blind adults. I didn't really have any blind friends. And I didn't really want to. I didn't want to think of myself as blind. I wanted to think of myself as someone who just happened to be blind. And when I went to Berkeley, that really got turned on its head because for the first time in my life, I met a community of amazing, smart, funny, clever, interesting, sweet, blind people who were also students at Berkeley and who were adults in the community.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  Berkeley is, you know, one of the sort of hotspots of disability rights and disability culture. And I didn't know that at all when I came to Berkeley as a undergraduate. I just knew that they had a great physics department. And so I, I was sort of suddenly plunged into this very disability positive culture at Berkeley and

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Was stunned by it and it was just amazing. And I realized at that time in the cave, which was a sort of cultural center and educational resource for us. But it was also a place where we all went and would wind up talking and hanging out.

• 8:59Flora Lichtman?

  Doing shots.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Doing shots and, you know, all kinds of other unsavory undergraduate activities. And it was unbelievably enlightening. And I just, ever since then, I don't say I just happen to be blind. I say, I am a blind scientist. I am a blind parent. I am a blind musician. And it's because everything that I do in the world is impacted and influenced by my blind experience. And I'm not trying to minimize it. I'm proud of it.

• 9:34Flora Lichtman?

  I love that. You recount stories in the book about walking around Berkeley and becoming sort of more and more aware of how useless some of these accessibility modifications are. I would like you to talk to us about ATMs and why they suck.

• 9:51Speaker 03

  Well, they certainly used to suck. You know, in the book, one of the things, one of the stories that I tell is, you know, in the late 90s, there were no accessible ATMs. But they did have Braille all over them because they didn't want to put in the effort to make the ATMs talk. I mean, they were computers. They could have talked, but quite frankly, it was a PR move. Because when sighted people see Braille all over the ATM, they think that it's accessible. But of course, it's not because what the Braille says is, if you need help getting money, go into the bank and ask for help, which is not an accessible device.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  It's a cop out. The ATMs are now accessible. If you have a plug in earphone, you can insert it into the jack and put the other end into your ear and the ATM will talk to you and you can get your cash out of it. Just in time, I'll say, for cash to kind of be vanishingly irrelevant.

• 10:56Flora Lichtman?

  Just in time for it to be useless again in a different way.

• 10:59Speaker 03

  And now that none of us are carrying earphones anymore because we all use Bluetooth, but it took a lot of work by disability rights activists. And like all the other things in the world, things don't stand still, right? You do the work, you get the benefits, and then the world has moved on to the next thing. And you need to do the work over again. And we can hope that each iteration of new technology and new buildings and new streets is going to be better than the last one.

• 11:35Flora Lichtman?

  Stick around because after the break, Josh takes his fight to the streets.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  I realized that street signs were actually embossed. And I would heave myself up and I could then hold on to the pole with one hand and read the sign with the other hand.

• 11:56Speaker 00

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• 14:12Flora Lichtman?

  One of the stories you recount in the book is the story of you carrying vice grips around for street signs. Can you just tell us about that?

• 14:19Speaker 03

  I am all about information accessibility. And one of the most pervasive pieces of information that we live with in the world is signage and signs and street signs. When a sighted person looks around in the world, they see signs everywhere. And a blind person does not have any access to those. So again, in the late 90s, before GPS, before we had technology that could help blind people know exactly where they were, I launched a one-person campaign. I realized that street signs were actually embossed and that if you could climb up the pole to feel the street sign, you could know what intersection you were at. And this was-

• 15:02Flora Lichtman?

  Like the eight-foot pole?

• 15:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, like eight, nine feet. And of course, climbing up a pole is difficult. And so what I came up with was- Was the idea of carrying around basically a clamp that I could clamp onto the pole at about shoulder height and I would heave myself up and stand on the clamp and I could then hold on to the pole with one hand and read the sign with the other hand and it of course was kind of performance art because I would only do it when I absolutely had to but people would see me doing it and say, excuse me, what are you doing? And it would give me this opportunity to say, well, I'm trying to find out what street this is. And accessibility is not just about

• 15:44Speaker 03

  inventing the technologies, it's about creating the opportunities for the conversation about how things can be better.

• 15:51Flora Lichtman?

  I think that's the perfect segue into some of your mapping inventions. Tell me about them.

• 15:57Speaker 03

  Maps are another great example of information that everyone who can see has ready access to, but which blind people are limited, very limited. And I wanted maps that could help me get from place to place because one of the things that happens, you know, I talked about the the street signs, blind people who don't have access to information about where they are or how the streets are laid out, used to have to spend a lot of time getting lost, physically exploring on foot, finding their way from one place to another. And I just felt like that's another

• 16:36Speaker 03

  example of how we are taxed on our time as people with disabilities. We have to spend more time doing normal things than other people do. So my dream was to build a system that would let blind people have access to tactile street maps of any place they wanted. Tactile means touch, of course. So I created this thing called TMAP, the Tactile Maps Automated Production System, that would take the information about the streets and produce it as a tactile map that could be felt. And it's really important to note that you can't just take a visual map and make it into something that you can feel because

• 17:20Speaker 03

  You need to keep the graphics really simple in order to make them readable. So for the first time, blind people had the ability to look at neighborhoods and intersections and parks and campuses to help them plan to help us plan routes from one place to another, or just build a mental map of of a place that you wanted to learn more about, you know?

• 17:46Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, to understand the spatial relationships.

• 17:48Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. Without spending five hours wandering around that region, getting lost.

• 17:55Flora Lichtman?

  Doing it by literally on foot.

• 17:57Speaker 03

  On foot.

• 17:59Flora Lichtman?

  Do can we play with one of these?

• 18:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, so one of the things that I developed was a set of station maps for the BART system. BART is the the the San Francisco Bay Area's subway. They are maps of the stations themselves so that when you go into a BART station, it gives you access to knowing where you need to go in the train station to get in and out without getting bluntly lost in the station. So one of the things we did with these BART maps was to use a computer operated smart pen that when you tap the pen on the map, gives you labeling information about what the thing is that you're tapping on. So if I tap on the the top of the map, it'll tell me what it is.

• 18:46Speaker 05

  BART station, concourse level, north.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  So it told me the name of the map. It told me the name of the station. It tells me that it's looking at I'm looking at the concourse level, not the street level or the platform level.

• 19:00Flora Lichtman?

  So you feel it with your finger you and then you use the pen to have it tell you more?

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you can use this system for all kinds of other things, but using it for maps lets people have access to spatial information about where they want to go and more independence, more not only more independence, but more confidence as they travel from one place to another.

• 19:22Flora Lichtman?

  Do any of these big advances in tech like AI, you know, these large language models, robots?

• 19:31Flora Lichtman?

  Are they helpful for making the world more accessible? Are they making the world more accessible?

• 19:36Speaker 03

  Technology is always just a tool, but they are only as good as the way the tools are designed. And AI, while it has amazing uses for accessibility, can also be a barrier. For example, some people thought that they could just use AI to fix inaccessible websites. And in doing so, many of them made websites even less accessible than they would have been without the AI. You know, one of the slogans of the disability rights movement is "Nothing About Us Without Us." And that applies, applies double or triple or quadruple in the development of technology

• 20:19Speaker 03

  for accessibility and disability.

• 20:22Flora Lichtman?

  I have to tell you, after I read your book, I started to really see the world differently. Like, I just became much more aware of the bumps on the sidewalk or the braille on the elevator buttons. And I wasn't just, like, noticing that they exist, but wondering whether it was useful. And so I just want to thank you for that. Thanks for making me, you know, more curious about the world. I appreciate it.

• 20:48Speaker 03

  I want to thank you for noticing it. And I want to thank you for taking from this book, I think, what I had tried to put into it.

• 20:57Flora Lichtman?

  Dr. Joshua Mealy is an inventor, an adaptive technology designer, and the author of Connecting Dots: A Blind Life.

• 21:07Flora Lichtman?

  And that is about all we have time for. Lots of folks helped make this show happen, including Diana Plasker, Jordan Smudgic, Emma Gomez,

• 21:17Speaker 06

  Valissa Mears.

• 21:19Flora Lichtman?

  I'm Flora Lichtman. Thanks for listening.