Accessibility in the Open – Driving global disability equity through open source
Joshua Miele (Amazon Lab126 | UC Berkeley)
Distinguished Lecture
Thursday, February 1, 2024, 3:30 pm
Abstract
At its heart, accessibility is usability for people with disabilities. This presentation introduces the basics of disability-inclusive design and its impact on global disability equity and inclusion. Drawing on examples and counterexamples from his own life and career, Dr. Miele describes some of the friction the accessibility field has faced, and speculates about what challenges may lie ahead, with particular emphasis on the centrality of user-centered practices, and the exhilarating potential of open source solutions and communities.
Bio
Dr. Miele self identifies as a blind scientist, designer, and disability activist, focusing on the overlap of technology, disability, and equity. He is Distinguished Fellow of Disability, Accessibility, and Design at UC Berkeley's Othering and Belonging Institute, as well as a Principal Accessibility Researcher at Amazon's Lab126. He has a bachelors degree in physics and a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics from the University of California at Berkeley. For over 20 years he based his work at the Smith-Kettlewell Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Blindness and Low Vision in San Francisco. There he led a team of engineers, scientists, and designers dedicated to addressing a wide variety of accessible information challenges in education, employment, and entertainment. His work integrates universal and inclusive design, accessibility engineering, education research, psychophysics, disability studies, and other disciplines, applying emerging technologies and ideas to a wide range of social and information accessibility challenges. He is most well-known for his work on Tactile Maps Automated Production (an award-winning tool that makes tactile street maps accessible for blind and visually-impaired travelers), YouDescribe (a crowdsourcing tool that allows anyone to add audio description to any YouTube video to make it more accessible for blind viewers), Show and Tell (an Alexa experience that uses computer vision to identify packaged pantry items), and the Blind Arduino Project (a collaborative community building and disseminating knowledge to support blind makers to independently design and build their own accessible devices). He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, father of 2, and lives in Berkeley California.
This talk is available on the Allen School's YouTube channel.
This Distinguished Lecture is co-sponsored by the Center for Research and Education on Accessible Technology and Experiences (CREATE).