\n <\/p>\n
Josh Miele explains the nuances of a tactile map of a Bay Area Rapid Transit station.<\/span>Credit: Laurie Udesky<\/span><\/p>\n This article is part of an occasional series in which Nature profiles scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests.<\/p>\n Fifty-seven-year-old Josh Miele is a blind scientist, an inventor of adaptive technology and a 2021 MacArthur Foundation \u2018genius\u2019 fellow. In the 1990s, as an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) \u2014 before the invention of GPS \u2014 Miele could be seen around town climbing up street signs and feeling the embossed letters to work out which street he was on when travelling in unfamiliar areas, all to the surprise of bystanders. \u201cSome accessibility is just about getting things done, and some accessibility is about teaching others about how much of a pain in the neck it is to get things done,\u201d says Miele.<\/p>\n Structural biology for researchers with low vision<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Miele was nurtured by his mother from a young age to buck the system. In his 2025 memoir, Connecting the Dots, he recounts a visit to an art museum, during which his mother urged him to get up close to a sculpture and \u201cfeel it with his hands\u201d.<\/p>\n As he did so, he was mortified to hear his mother berating the museum staff for trying to deprive him of the hands-on experience. It was one of many instances of his mother making him \u201cpractise breaking the rules, thinking about when they needed to be broken and practising being visible, all of which are essential for me now\u201d, says Miele, a polymath whose pursuits have included physics and space-science studies, working on a Mars probe and doctoral work on the psychology of sound perception. All of which would set him up for a career in designing accessible technology. Miele met a reporter from Nature\u2019s careers team at his neat, compact woodworking studio in Berkeley, where he goes \u201cto get out of his head\u201d, carving chopstick holders and other things.<\/p>\n Miele wasn\u2019t born blind \u2014 a neighbour attacked him with acid when he was four years old, blinding and badly burning him. He reflects in his memoir that his young age probably protected his outlook: \u201cI had a life to enjoy, and I couldn\u2019t let being blind and burned prevent it.\u201d<\/p>\n Instead, the incident forced him to begin engineering the world around him in his neighbourhood of Brooklyn, New York City, to make it work for him. He felt around his home to map it out, built a map of his neighbourhood in his mind and took apart radios and household appliances to understand how they worked. Miele used the echo of the sound his roller skates made to help him steer clear of objects that he might crash into while zooming down the pavement in front of his family\u2019s house. At age 12, with a friend\u2019s mother dictating instructions, he coded his first computer program, commanding an early home computer to count on screen from one to ten. In secondary school, inspired by the 1983 film WarGames \u201cabout a computer hacker guy with a talking computer\u201d and with the help of his Braille teacher, Miele set up a speech synthesizer as a rudimentary screen reader on his home computer.<\/p>\n Several years later, during his physics undergraduate degree, he helped to update the features of outSPOKEN, a software for people with low vision or who are blind that reads aloud what is displayed on a computer\u2019s graphical user interface. The Mac version was originally released in 1989 by Berkeley Systems, a small, local software company.<\/p>\n Miele got the job through his connection with Marc Sutton, whom he describes as \u201ca laid-back blind hippie\u201d. They met in The Cave, the basement of a UCB library in which blind students congregated to use Braille machines and other accessible equipment, talk about disability rights and learn from each other. Miele says that students worked and played hard at all hours in The Cave.<\/p>\n Working Scientist career profiles<\/p>\n<\/p>\n His interactions with The Cave cohort and the wider disability-rights community marked a turning point for Miele. Before UCB, he says, \u201cI didn\u2019t think of myself as being part of a disability community. Why would I?\u201d There weren\u2019t any positive portrayals of blind and disabled people, in general, he says. With his new-found peers, he quickly realized that \u201cwe all deal with other people telling us that we can\u2019t do stuff, building things that we can\u2019t use and marginalizing us intentionally or unintentionally\u201d.<\/p>\n A long-term friend and colleague of Miele\u2019s who is also blind, UCB English professor Georgina Kleege, says that outSPOKEN was the first screen reader she ever used \u2014 although she didn\u2019t know Miele at the time. \u201cIt changed my life. It made my life possible, because it meant I could use a computer,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n In 1993, Miele pursued an internship at NASA\u2019s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, indulging his childhood interest in rockets and outer space. There, he helped to develop software to calibrate optical sensors aboard the Mars Observer probe that launched in 1992. But the spacecraft disappeared before it entered Mars\u2019 orbit.<\/p>\n Deeply disheartened, Miele felt like physics was no longer the right place for him. Once back in Berkeley, he realized that building accessible technologies \u201cwas probably the most value I could add\u201d, he says. \u201cI knew that it would be fun. I knew it would be interesting. I knew that there was plenty of work to do.\u201d So, he put his undergraduate studies on hold to work full time at Berkeley Systems.<\/p>\n Josh Miele enjoys playing music.<\/span>Credit: 2016 Barbara Butkus<\/span><\/p>\n Because I find classwork really unsatisfying. I am motivated by doing things that make a difference in people\u2019s lives. I\u2019m always thinking about problems that people with disabilities have and I learn about new technologies as they come along. Sometimes things come to me in the shower.<\/p>\n My stepfather, a geophysicist, was one. He was incredible at explaining things to me. For example, when I was young, he laid out two ropes on a table for me to feel to explain the difference between the wave height and wave density of AM and FM radio frequencies. Science-fiction writer Ursula Le Guin is another, because she wrote and thought about people in unusual ways. And she\u2019s a master of the pencil sketch with words.<\/p>\n I love music and enjoy performing. And I wanted to be cool. As young kids, aged 13\u201314 years, we formed a band called Child Labor. It was a play on \u2018Men at Work\u2019, a group that was popular at the time.<\/p>\n Eventually, Miele realized that he needed to return to UCB to finish his bachelor\u2019s degree and did so in 1997. He\u2019d already completed his physics requirements and spent his last semester taking courses in music appreciation, disability studies and psychology.<\/p>\n In 1998, he began his PhD in psychoacoustics and cognitive psychology at UCB. \u201cI wanted to study ways of using non-speech sounds, including 3D immersive audio, to present information for screen-reader users, to speed up those interactions,\u201d he says. For instance, he explains, imagine a screen reader reading out information in the top-left cell of a spreadsheet or table and it sounding like the voice was coming from the left and above the user. \u201cIt\u2019s more efficient and intuitive than having the speech say \u2018top-left cell\u2019,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n That same year, he started an internship at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, California. There, he worked on the data-analysis software MATLAB, to make it accessible to blind people. His Smith-Kettlewell stint evolved into a 19-year relationship, both during and after his PhD.<\/p>\n The institute\u2019s environment \u201cwas incredibly flexible and accommodating\u201d, says Miele. \u201cIt was also one of the few research institutions in the world that valued the kind of accessibility technology research programme that I wanted to build.\u201d His proudest work included developing a way for blind and partially sighted people to print embossed, or raised, tactile street maps for any US location \u2014 to get a full picture of a neighbourhood or address through their fingers. Miele started the project, called tactile map automated production (TMAP), in 2003 as a postdoc at Smith-Kettlewell.<\/p>\n For it, he repurposed coding that he had developed for his graduate work, which enabled him to print research charts and graphs in Braille. He applied the program to data from geographical information systems (GIS) freely available through the US Census Bureau. Other people had used GIS to create tactile maps, Miele explains, but these required visual interfaces. \u201cThey were sighted people making maps for blind people.\u201d<\/p>\n Josh Miele (standing) teaches a participant at a Blind Arduino Project workshop; he launched this series of maker gatherings in 2015.<\/span>Credit: Jean Miele 2026<\/span><\/p>\n TMAP enabled blind people to create a Braille printable map at the scale and location of their choice and on their own. \u201cThis revolutionized the availability of tactile street maps for blind travelers,\u201d noted a Smith-Kettlewell announcement in September 2021 (see go.nature.com\/3zabzja).<\/p>\n Steve Landau is a close friend and frequent collaborator of Miele\u2019s and the founder and president of Touch Graphics, an accessibility technology company in Newark, Delaware. The firm specializes in products that convey spatial information through touch. He has wrestled with Miele over the usability of the firm\u2019s assistive technologies. Landau says that Miele can be blunt and has frequently \u201cburst his bubble\u201d, explaining why something he proposed won\u2019t work.<\/p>\n These tools help visually impaired scientists read data and journals<\/p>\n<\/p>\n Landau worked with Miele on creating a digital version of TMAP known as the Talking Tactile Tablet (TTT). One disagreement centred on how people would use screen touching on the tablet. As a sighted person, Landau explains, he was overlooking the complex ways in which blind people swipe and rotate their fingers on surfaces. \u201cI needed to be schooled to make the device as intuitive as possible.\u201d<\/p>\n The TTT enabled users to print an embossed map to overlay the tablet\u2019s screen. Then, by tapping a map area, the tablet would spit out spoken information, such as street names, the number of traffic lanes, the direction of traffic and the location of pedestrian crossings. The handheld tablet worked well even for people who don\u2019t know Braille, Landau explains.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Josh Miele explains the nuances of a tactile map of a Bay Area Rapid Transit station.Credit: Laurie Udesky Working scientist profiles This article is part of an occasional series in which Nature profiles scientists with unusual career histories or outside interests. Fifty-seven-year-old Josh Miele is a blind scientist, an inventor of adaptive technology and a<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44100,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[534,701,6743,337,2509,5989],"class_list":{"0":"post-44099","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-community","9":"tag-disability","10":"tag-friendly","11":"tag-life","12":"tag-mission","13":"tag-user"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44099"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44099\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44100"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Working scientist profiles<\/h3>\n
Outspoken start<\/h2>\n
Quick-fire Q&A<\/h3>\n
Why did it take 10 years for you to finish your undergraduate degree?<\/h2>\n
Who are your greatest influences and mentors?<\/h2>\n
What drew you to playing guitar and being in a band when you were younger?<\/h2>\n
A fresh direction<\/h2>\n