← All Of It with Alison Stewart
All Of It with Alison Stewart
How Joshua Miele Turned an Acid Attack into a Career In Accessibility
00:19:00
MacArthur fellow Joshua Miele recounts how the acid attack that blinded and scarred him as a child led to a career at the intersection of design, technology, and accessibility.
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Josh Mealy
Listener Supported WNYC Studios.
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Alison Stewart
This is all of it on wnyc. I'm Alison Stewart, A reminder that it is time to start reading our march get lit with all of It Book Club pick. It's Mothers and Sons by Adam Hayslett. The novel follows a New York City based asylum lawyer named Peter. He's gay and he became estranged from his mother after a night of violence 20 years ago tore their relationship apart. But now Peter is faced with the case of a young gay man that reminds him of what happened that night and the secret he and his mother share. I will be in conversation with Otter, Adam Hayslett and you on Wednesday, April 2nd at the New York Public Library, Stavros Niarchos Foundation Library Branch. To get your tickets and to learn how to borrow your E copy from our partners at the NYPL, head to wnyc.org getlit now. Tickets are free and they tend to sell out really quickly, so reserve yours today. WNYC.org Getlit and Adam Hazlett will be our guest on Wednesday with the preview of the novel. Now let's get this hour started with scientist and author Josh Mehle. Our next guest, Josh MEALY, is a MacArthur Genius Fellow and is known for being a leading voice in the intersection of accessibility, design and technology. He became interested in the work after a childhood fascination with telephones and radio. And there's a personal part of his work. Longtime New Yorkers may remember the story of a Park Avenue a Park Slope boy who was attacked by a neighbor who poured acid on him. The boy was left permanently blind and scarred. The neighbor was a paranoid schizophrenic who was remanded to have missed a psychiatric facility. But the boy, Josh Mealy, never once thought his injury should limit what he could achieve. He wanted to live the same life as his friends. He demanded to ride the regular school bus. In high school. He started a band. He flirted with girls. He experimented with psychedelics. Now he has a prestigious science career for his day job. Mealy is Amazon's principal accessibility researcher. He's written a new memoir about his life. It's called Connecting a Blind Life. Joshua Melee joins me now. Hi Josh.
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Josh Mealy
Hi Alison. Thank you.
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Alison Stewart
So you start the book by addressing what happened to you in October of 1973. The details are quite intense, but you've said how you don't want this event to be seen as a tragedy. So how did you think about telling about this important event in your life within the framework of this memoir?
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Josh Mealy
Well, thank you so much. The book is really about being blind, not about becoming blind. But of course everyone has a question when you have a career in accessibility and technology related to blindness and when you are blind. And of course, I'm also burned and have scars all over my face. And it's very apparent that something happened. And so there's always the question, what happened? And just like in my life, I felt that in the book it was best to tell it and get it done with so that we could get on with telling the story of my blind life and being blind and how it is to be a blind person in a sighted world. Not just to exist, but to thrive and to have an education and a career and a family and all of the things that most people aspire to.
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Alison Stewart
You write about park slope in the.
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Interviewer
70S, growing up on President Street.
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Alison Stewart
First of all, what have people forgotten.
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Interviewer
About park slope in the 70s?
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Josh Mealy
Well, Park Slope in the 70s was not the Park Slope that we have come to know and love today. Park Slope today is a lovely neighborhood with lots of. Lots of fabulous restaurants and expensive stores and out of sight real estate. But back then it was pretty gritty. There were lots of abandoned houses. There were bars all up and down the main drags with people drinking all day. There were fights and muggers. And park, it's called Park Slope, of course, because it's immediately adjacent to Prospect park, which is gorgeous, but was quite dangerous at that time. And it was an edgy neighborhood. And our family had moved in in the late 60s and it was still a fairly sketchy place, although it was lovely. I'm very happy to have grown up there at that time, but it was a different neighborhood than we know today.
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Interviewer
You write about the adjustments that you had to make with how you engaged with your President street home and your neighborhood after your injuries. What changed about how you experienced and engaged with your world on President Street?
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Josh Mealy
Being blind is not just not being able to see. It's actually developing a whole range of skills and noticing things that you wouldn't otherwise notice if you're focusing on what your eyes are telling you. And so becoming a blind person is a whole array of experiences and learning to not only do the things that you want to do, but how to get the information about the world that you need in order to be effective, independent, and enjoy what you want to do. So I was, you know, I was all of a sudden a little blind kid, where before I had been a little sighted kid. And it's interesting, I think a lot of people ask me what, you know, how, you know, weren't you freaked out? Weren't you upset? Weren't you depressed? And the truth is that I really wasn't. I was a little kid, and I wanted to get on with the business of being a little kid. So I was doing everything in my power to not be, you know, to not be othered. You know, that's a modern word, but to not be sort of coddled and protected and thought of. As a blind kid, I just wanted to climb and run and play and roller skate on the street. So one of the things that I tell about in connecting dots is about my experience as a little kid where I had a pair of metal roller skates. I was roller skating around in the kitchen on the tile floor, and my mom very wisely said, get out of here. You're gonna break the tiles. Go roller skate on the street. And of course, that's, you know, not every mother would tell a little blind kid who had just been burned with acid to go roller skate on the street, but my mom did. And I think that that's one of the reasons why I'm sort of why I am the free ranger that I am, I guess. And I noticed in roller skating on the street that the noise from the skates was actually really helpful. I could hear it bouncing off of the stoops and the planters and the wrought iron railings and the cars and the trees. I could hear where I was just from the noise from the skates. And it turns out that's not at all unusual. All blind people that are pretty good at getting around use echolocation to some extent or another, whether they're aware of it or not. The sounds that we hear help us navigate and understand the world that we move through. And it's just one of the ways that I learned and. And became adept at being a blind person.
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Interviewer
When you think about this time in.
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Alison Stewart
Your life, how did this time affect your life's work as an adult?
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Josh Mealy
You know, we are the sum total of our experience. Everything we do is brought to the things we do next. And I was curious about the world as a little kid, and I have always been curious about the world. I wanted to know how things work. I wanted to know how and why the world Functioned the way it did about trees and plants and structures and electronics. And so I would, everybody knew this about me. They would bring me broken radios to take apart and experiment with and learn about the components that were inside. And I would do, I would try to build mechanical devices in my basement and all kinds of things. And really, of course, I wasn't very good at building things. As a six or seven year old, I would build, you know, they were sort of imaginary machines and so on, but at the same time, it drove me to do the same things sort of and get better and better at it. So I, you know, I was, I was. It, I think, was the fundamental part of why I wanted to study physics as a. As an undergraduate at Berkeley, why I wanted to understand the, you know, I did an internship at NASA, which I tell about in the book, and, and how I ultimately realized that actually while physics was fascinating and something that I will always love and the way the world works, the fundamental principles of nature are deeply fascinating to me. I realized that as a blind person, the things that I needed to be able to do, needed intelligent design, as it were, needed somebody to pay attention to how the tools of blindness were built and built in the context of being blind. And most of the tools that are available or were available to me as a young person were designed by sighted people. Even though they were intended for blindness, for blind people, they weren't necessarily as good as they could be. And in order to make the world a better place for blind people and for myself, because of course, when I design for blind people, I am designing, at least in part for myself. I realized that rather than study physics in the long term, my, my joy and my contribution would be best done as a. As someone who designs tools for blind people. And most of the tools that I design start out as ideas for myself for things that I want to be able to do better. Maps, video description, and so on, and, and ultimate, I make sure that they work for other people as well.
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Alison Stewart
Josh, what is an example of something that was well intended, that was invented to help people, but you said, hey, you know what, this could be better?
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Josh Mealy
You know, that's a great question. And it can be really subtle stuff. So one of the things that I noticed as a kid carrying around. So one of the things that I'll also point out is that there are many things in the world that were originally designed for people with disabilities that wind up in the mainstream. This is often referred to as the curb cut effect, because curb cuts, while designed for wheelchairs, turn out to be super useful for everybody from people on skateboards to people with shopping carts, to strollers, to just people who can't lift their feet that high. And so the curb cut effect is an amazing thing. And audiobooks are a great example of those. And as a kid, I read a lot of audiobooks that were made for blind people and they would come on cassettes. And the cassette players were designed as if they were toys. They were brightly colored. They were big and bulky. They were made as if for children. And while I was a child, I felt like the product was designed down to me and I didn't want to use it in public. I didn't want people to see me carrying around a big old tape recorder that was brightly colored like a Fisher Price game. And even just that subtlety of difference, if it had been smaller and more, more, you know, cooler looking, I would have been more willing to carry that around with me. And that's just the tip of the iceberg, Alison. There's so many examples of things that could be designed better. And that's really what my, you know, what I'm hoping. One of the things I'm hoping people will take from the book is that the world can be designed better. It doesn't require a lot of effort. It just requires people to realize that blind people and people with disabilities have just as much interest in fashion sense and ease of use as anyone else. And that if we take some appropriate measures to know what is needed, what the design requirements are for basic products as we design them, we don't need to design special products for disabled customers. We can just design products for everyone that are delightful and usable by everyone. And that's really what I'm trying to do in the world. And one of the things, one of the many things I'm hoping folks will take away from Connecting Dots.
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Interviewer
My guest is MacArthur genius fellow Joshua Mele. His day job is at Amazon's principal accessibility researcher. His book is called. His memoir is called Connecting Dots A Blind Life. So as a kid, you were obsessed with maps. You mentioned that before. And as you entered your professional life in science, you created a software known as Hope I get this right. Tactile maps, automated production, tmap.
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Josh Mealy
That's it.
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Interviewer
What was the idea behind the design?
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Josh Mealy
Well, the idea was, and, you know, I want to mention, by the way, that, you know, this is my memoir and I, you know, these are all. Many stories are in there, and many stories didn't make it in. There was only so much room. But in putting this together, I Worked with an amazing collaborator, Wendell Jamison, who is my co author on the book and who has become an incredible friend and partner in this. And he really helped me tell these stories about the maps. I'm a scientist and a designer. I can tell a good story sometimes, but I don't think I would have been able to tell these stories in quite this way. And the maps is a great example of how Wendell helped me discover narrative arcs within my own life that I hadn't even noticed. And so, yeah, I mean, when I was a kid, my stepfather, Klaus Jakob is a geophysicist at Columbia and I would go to his lab sometimes as a little kid and all over the walls were these amazing vacuum formed plastic relief maps of landscapes, of geographies that I of course, had never experienced. Alaska, Africa, Europe, Asia, all these amazing mountain ranges and river valleys and, you know, glacial, glacial plains. It was just, and it was just a revelation to me as a blind kid because maps are not something that blind kids have good access to. And so I discovered a love for maps by visiting Klaus's lab. But then I realized as a young person that there was everybody else in the world. All the sighted people had access to street maps that they could, that they could just, you know, if they didn't know a neighborhood, they wanted to know how to get somewhere. They would just open up, you know, Google Maps or, you know, before that, they would pull out a, pull out a map from the glove compartment and look at it or whatever. And blind people didn't have anything like that. And not only did we not have it, but the need was actually greater because when you're walking around in a city, you can't look up and look at the street signs if you're blind. We didn't have GPS when I was young. And so building a mental model of a streetscape, of a street network, knowing what the shapes of the intersections are from a map that you could touch, knowing how the streets connect to one another, where the dead ends are in the cul de sacs would be so incredibly valuable, and yet we didn't have access to that at all. So early in my career, when I was a postdoc at the Smith Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, I took it on as a project to build a system that would allow blind people to create, download and print out their own tactile street maps of anywhere they wanted. Which was, it sounds so basic and obvious, and yet it didn't exist. And it didn't exist for a number of reasons. One of which was because there was bad science that said blind people couldn't actually benefit from tactile street maps. And of course I knew that wasn't true. And the blind people I knew, we all knew that it wasn't true. So I developed a system called TMAP that allowed a blind person to independently specify a street map of any area and download it and print it out on their own braille embosser. And I did that early work in the, you know, 2004, 5, 6. And that system still has continued to improve and modernize and is now a product held by the San Francisco Lighthouse. And they use it for any to create street maps for any of their students that need tactile street maps. And that's services available to anyone, anywhere for a very small fee.
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Alison Stewart
I think you can read more about Josh in school, in his band, his time with drugs. There's a lot in this memoir. It's called Connecting Dots, A Blind Life. Josh Mealy, thank you so much for sharing your life story with us, Allison.
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Josh Mealy
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