Ideas - What it's like to travel as a blind person

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Blind life is an individual experience. But from neighbourhood walks to international travel, blind people want momentum, adventure, and a sense of place, like everyone else. This podcast features an artist and a scientist imagining bolder ways forward.Guest in this episode:Alex Bulmer is a Blind writer and theatre artist. Her play Perceptual Archaeology or How to Travel Blind, is included in the collection Rebellious Bodies and Radical Acts. She is at work on a multimedia project called May I Take Your Arm.Joshua Miele is a Blind scientist, inventor and a MacArthur Fellow who’s designing accessibility tech from inside the experience of disability. He's also the author of Connecting Dots: A Blind Life.

Canada makes good stuff, and we carry a lot of it. At HealthyPlanetCanada.com, more than 10,000 products are Canadian and all 100% authentic. So whether you need soup season groceries, clean beauty for dry air, or sports nutrition and supplements, shop with confidence at HealthyPlanetCanada.com. Family-owned, proudly Canadian since 1995. From here, life looks good. This is a CBC podcast. When in your life would you say you reached peak frustration? It happens every few days.

Joshua Mealy is blind. He says that simply moving through his day can be exasperating. Just not in the ways that sighted people might think. Things can be super irritating in the world as you travel around, as you commute, as you go from place to place as a blind person. And most of it is frustration with sort of other people and their assumptions about what you can and can't do. Welcome to ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Please look right for traffic when exiting. Every day, blind people need to travel through spaces built for those with sight. And that requires certain skills. As you step forward, swing the tip of the case. to the opposite side. The arc of your cane should be about the width of your shoulders or a bit wider. Getting around requires extra capabilities too. Blind people need patience, initiative, guts, and sometimes a little punk rock energy.

Street signs, this was before we had good access to GPS on our phones. I started a campaign of climbing signs. It turns out that the signs themselves are actually tactile. So I was like, damn. If you order Uber pets, it's more expensive. And I don't think I should necessarily have to pay for a dog, guide dog, by the way, a tool that I need. You know, it's a disability rights thing. So I have this technique.

If I'm with a friend, then I will order an Uber. And I say to them, don't look like we're together. You go to the door, open the door. and then I'll get into the Uber because they don't usually drive off if the door has been open. That's Alex Bollmer, an award-winning theater artist

you'll hear profiled in this episode, along with former Sign Clymer-turned-Scientist Joshua Mealy, a MacArthur fellow who's designing accessibility tech from inside the experience of disability. There are so many people who want to build AI-based navigation tools, AI, smart glasses that can help you cross the street or, you know, avoid obstacles or find a

storefront. And in fact, if you're blind, I'm blind and I'm already doing all of those things. In different ways, Josh Mealy and Alex Balmer have made the psychological journey to accepting and thriving in blind identity. They've also made blind travel a focus of the their professional work, imagining bolder pathways for blind people who simply want the same freedom to move around as the rest of us. And to the rest of us, awkwardly seized up at the sight of someone with a white cane at an intersection, they offer this advice. Just say hi. Don't take me across the street because you think that's where I want to go, because often it is not. Because somebody can't see doesn't mean they don't know where they are. Because

I have people asking me that. You don't know where you are? Yeah, I do. No, you don't. Yeah, actually. I do. Where are you? Seeing is not the sign of knowing.

Alex Balmer spoke to ideas producer Lisa Gottre. I have retinitis pigmentosa. I was diagnosed at the age of 21 after experiencing night blindness and loss of depth perception. And it happened gradually. When Alex got her diagnosis, she was a theater student in Toronto, and she suddenly felt the need to make new plans away from home. When I was 24 years old and moving to the UK to go and study voice at the Central School of

Speech and Drama, and I'd chosen to study voice because I didn't think there was any hope for a career as an actor losing their sight, but I thought, ah, voice. I learned to be a voice teacher, and sight loss will not take that away. The diagnosis was made, and everybody around me was very upset and started to treat me as if I'd become blind overnight and I hadn't. But for everyone else, it was incredibly real. And I found that just horrifying. I wasn't ready. I wasn't ready to become, I wasn't ready to become a disabled person. I wasn't ready to become a blind person. I wasn't ready for any of it. But going away to another country, hmm, okay, I could try. try on this changing identity and learn what she would need to make her way forward.

And it was because I was going to a new country where nobody knew me, I was able to embrace this idea that someone was going to give me a cane and a white cane, and I was going to use it, and they were going to teach me how to walk with this piece of aluminum in front of me. And I really do think that part of that, part of my ability to do that was because I was leaving everyone who knew me. And it was very hard because I had become a tragedy for a lot of people around me. My name is Alex Palmer. I am an artist. I primarily work in live theater as a writer, performer, a director.

I have also worked in film and television as a writer. and radio, primarily in the UK, where I lived for 15 years and now I go back and forth. By the time I was 35, I was just piecing little bits of images together to try and come up with a hole. My face disappeared in the mirror pretty much around 35. The world disappeared a little bit more every five years. and now I'm, I guess what you call it total. The language that I used for many years as I transitioned from sighted to blind

was sight loss or vision loss. And I remember this moment, and I wrote about it and it's in my play, having this idea that I was hanging on to a rope that was fraying, you know, the rope being sight. And it was fraying and fraying, gradually fraying and fraying and becoming like a little thin piece of string. And I was clinging to it.

And I thought, wait a minute, what if I let go of that and hold on to a rope that's very thick? I might not know it, but it's strong and it's there. And that rope was blindness. and it really it changed me when I had this idea that let go of the fray and hold on to the strong

and strong was blindness and from pretty much from that point on I defined myself as becoming blind as opposed to sight loss you know and it's more than just language actually does I find language helps me

understand and that words are like I like these flat stones that I can feel beneath my feet that take me forward you know I have always used words and language to in a sense help me survive things that are emotionally incredibly difficult so that really helped becoming blind how did you know there was a rope uh I'm not sure to say that I knew, but perhaps that's some kind of faith or belief that it would be there. And, you know, there were blind people out there who were doing interesting good things. I didn't know many, but I knew enough to know that it was possible. It's a really great question. I mean, and I do use the word faith, not in the, not necessarily in the religious sense, but I'm not sure it's

that different. Once I can identify, like I say, once I can find the language for something, it is like a kind of a form of faith because somehow everything just becomes really clear and when things become clear for me, they become possible. The play Alex Balmer mentioned is called perceptual archaeology or how to travel blind. The experience that she writes about in the play started in water. A swimming pool gave me the idea of becoming a blind traveler and also gave me the idea

that the way I was going to be in the world had potential. An idea born of crisis. It was 1996 and Alex was experiencing her situation as loss. I felt my world was crashing in on me. I felt the walls were

were closing. I had not left my apartment in Toronto for a number of days, if not weeks, as much as I could stay inside. I did. And I just thought I have to do something huge. Otherwise, I'm not going to get through this. So I got on a plane and I went to Los Angeles. I chose Los Angeles because my best friend was living there. And I thought, well, if something really goes wrong, I can call her. And I went to Los Angeles and I went to the airport hotel and I took my swimming suit and everything. I got, I put my swimming suit on and I went down, I asked the hotel staff for directions to the outdoor pool. I went out to the outdoor pool. And I, I guess at first I just thought, well,

this, this will be an accomplishment if I can just find a pool. And I put myself into the pool, lowered myself into the water, and realized that I had no idea of its size or shape or a depth. And I thought, huh, now what do I do? Here's how she describes it in her play. I traced the wall with my hand, swimming, around and around. I found cracks in the concrete, chunks missing. I discovered filters and flaps. swimming.

I noticed the lap slap of water against the pool edge. It shifted to a hollow sound by the ladder. Swimming. I heard a lap echo slap beneath the diving board. Swimming around and around. I came to understand that the pool shape was that of a kidney bean, round at one end and more narrow at the other. I discovered the pool, gradually, gathering pieces that with the immediacy of sight would have been eclipsed by the hole. I bobbed in the water, making

waves, and listening as they slapped against the edge of the pool. Over there, and over there, and I am here I listened over there and over there and I am here here in this particular collection

of sounds and textures this pool a shape of place emerged and I became present when place exists I exist within it Alex remembers feeling something shift. And I thought, this is so cool.

I'm becoming a perceptual archaeologist, you know, just finding little clues and making meaning of them. Or a sensory mathematician. Things were adding up to a hole. And had I been able to see, you know, the immediacy of sight, I just would have looked at the pool and go, right, kidney bean. And in I go and have a swim, and then, back to my room, I wouldn't have known any of the cracks or the flaps or the interesting sounds under the diving board.

So that moment changed my attitude because I could, I finally could believe that this way of being was actually going to be very interesting and full of information as opposed to, I think, what we so often and use blindness as a metaphor for not knowing, you know, blind to this and blind to that. It's like, actually, you know, you're misled by, we're misled by appearances. You know, we're not necessarily seeing what's there. Sometimes I think our knowledge is eclipsed by the whole

and by the immediacy of sight. In that pool, she found a way out of crisis and into a kind of richness that she calls blind gain rather than vision loss. I bobbed in the water and decided one day I would be a blind travel writer. I never told anybody. I kept it to myself and then I was traveling around with some Brazilians preparing for the 2012 Olympics in London where I was writing it. part of the opening ceremonies for the, yeah, for the Olympic events. And we had Brazilians on the, on with us because they were going to do the next 2016 Olympics. So I traveling around to these

Brazilians, in fact, we were in Brazil at the time, leaping off a boat and into the water. And I said to someone on the boat, you know, I really need to become a blind traveler because this is just so cool. I have no idea where we are. But I'm just loving this jumping into the air and leaping into the water and sort of imagining my, yeah, what my imagination was telling me what the place looked like. It was called Florianopolis. And everyone in the boat said, oh my God, what a great idea. You have to come, you know, you have to come. They were from all over Brazil. I had several invitations to go traveling around Brazil. And I just thought, okay, people are really responding to this idea. So I took the idea back to London.

where I was living at the time, and I started to tell some friends, and they got very excited. I did have a few friends think I'd lost the plot, because how was I going to travel? Where was I going to travel? And I came up with this idea that I would follow in the footsteps of a 19th century blind Navy officer turned,

sorry, he became blind when he was a Navy officer and then became a blind travel writer. and some of his writing still existed. So I was reading his writing. And I thought, okay, that's the hook. That's what I'm going to do. I'm going to follow in his footsteps. I'm going to be the 21st century Alex traveling as if we were walking together with this 19th century, James.

Voyage round the world, volume one, from 1827 to 1832 by James Holman, RN, FRS, etc., etc. James Holman was a 19th century Navy officer who became blind while on duty. He was around 24 or 25 years old, which was interesting because I was diagnosed at 21 and started to lose my sight exactly around that time. His was sudden. Mine was gradual. And he was put into a house, it was a royal house. It was a royal house for soldiers who'd been injured and had become invalids.

And they got free room and board and they had to pray twice a day for their free room and board and probably pledge allegiance to the king. And they didn't go out of that house. And he couldn't stand it. He just thought, I'm giving this up. I'm giving up my room, my board, my prayers, my king. He left. He started in France.

including travels in Africa, Asia, Australasia, America, etc., etc. He managed to navigate using the kindness of strangers. He would just hook up with whoever came along and they'd walk together. By having things described to me on the spot, I think it is possible for me to form as corrected judgment as my own sight would enable me to do. And to confirm my accuracy, I could bring many living witnesses to bear testimony to my endless inquiries and insatiable thirst for collecting information. Indeed, this is the secret of the delight I derive from travelling, affording me as it does a constant source of mental occupation,

and stimulating me so powerfully to physical exertion that I can bear a greater degree of bodily fatigue that anyone could suppose my frame to be capable of supporting. sometimes, and I love this, sometimes he would attach a rope to a caravan that was being pulled by horses to get a little bit more exercise rather than being in the caravan.

And he'd follow, hang on to a rope. So he had different techniques. He also, he used a lot of echolocation, a technique that I now use, blind people use, to identify where obstacles are before we hit them.

I don't do it as well as, other blind people do because I wasn't born blind. But yeah, you listen for sounds echoing off objects. So he did that. And he talks about listening for horses' hooves to give him a sense of direction. So, you know, he used his ears, he used his feet, he used his hands, all the things that I really discovered that I was using when I went traveling as well. Alex raised funding for her project and she set out for Europe. Unlike James Holman, she took a sighted friend along, and she met up with other creative blind people in the places that she visited. What she calls in her play, a global village of blindness, a neighborhood all over the world.

She felt great with Holman's credo ringing in her head. I seek information and momentum, not safety and protection. But two centuries on, there's much more information. and a whole lot of momentum. 21st century blind traveler Alex sometimes got overwhelmed. Yes, especially when I am relating to the world with my ears

and in unfamiliar places or spaces where sound is actually noise. And what I mean by that is noise without any sense of context or form or shape or idea is noise and it becomes sound when I can attach a meaning to it and so I think it's overwhelming when I can't make that transfer when I can't take noise to sound then I just am engulfed by volume

cars. If I'm walking, oh yeah, and where was I? I was in Cologne. I was in Germany, Cologne, Germany, or Cone, I think is the right way to pronounce it. Again, walking with my friend and we were about to cross a road. And it was a busy intersection. But the cars weren't just passing in front of me. They were also passing behind me. And I could not place, I couldn't give any sense of direction to the vehicles. And I just thought I'm surrounded by these like engines that had no shape, no direction. And I panicked. I put my hands over my face and I grabbed my friend's arm. And that was the last day I traveled. for a very long time, well, for about six months, because I just, I wasn't able to give context to the noises around me

in the way that I thought I could. But Alex did travel, and she wrote about it, and she's gone on to travel again, because there were encouraging moments, too. I was in Freiburg, and I went out on my own, and I heard this, clack, clack, clack, clack. And I thought, oh, there's a small horse out on the street. Isn't that great? Clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack. I thought, oh, no, it's not a small horse. It's a ladder falling over.

Glock, click, like, clack, clack, clack, clack, clack, like, clack, oh, it's a small horse climbing up a ladder that's falling over. And then I heard the sound of clapping. And I thought, oh, I know what it is. It's someone dancing, clog dancing. I just, I had this wonderful feeling of like the noise becoming a sound and the sound becoming an idea, which was not just dancing or clog dancing, but dancing in front of people and something I could engage with. And I just had this image in my head. And that to me became a freedom because I was able to connect with the experience and belong. So that's kind of the best scenario. when noise becomes a sound, becomes an idea, becomes a freedom. It's great. And I actually, I kind of, that's an example of when I really enjoy that process. You know, I really appreciate it. And it's kind of fun.

It's like being a detective. That is writer, performer, and blind traveler Alex Balmer. And this is Ideas. I'm Nala Ayed. Mr. President, my company formed me of the explosion on our rig, On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering the tsunami. They all heap to blame all me.

Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us out. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant. What would happen if I stop doing? You starve. You freeze the dead. That's what?

With great power comes great deniability. I'm not the earth, daddy. Digger. See the trailer online. Only here's October 2nd. The following is paid content for Dijerdin. Lately, it feels like, Everyone has a take on Gen Z. There's a misconception that everybody in our generation wants things handed to them.

Which is so unfair. A lot of the circumstances that other generations got to have, we simply do not have. So when Dissur Dend asked me to go out and hear directly from young people, I was all in. Because between Sky High Rent, $10 lottes and the AI Revolution got a lot to unpack. We went out to see what Gen Z's reality actually looks like and we made a web series out of it. It'll be on CBC Gem. It's called Count Us In and honestly I think you guys are going to love it. Digital Technology offers new options.

to people with vision loss, though everyone has a different relationship to technology. It's never been my best sport, but it's helped me immensely. I rely on my Alexa to help me keep track of a calendar. It's a quick way of getting information and my iPhone. Designing more thoughtful accessibility tech embedded in the actual experience of disability,

that's Joshua Mili's. goal. Here's a screen reader with his official bio. Joshua A. Meeley is a blind scientist, designer, author, and disability scholar. He writes, advises, and collaborates widely on accessible design, disability inclusive research methods, and the disability experience, with understandable emphasis on blindness and low vision. Josh has been recognized for his work. He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Distinguished Fellow of disability, accessibility, and design at University of California at Berkeley. His memoir, Connecting Dots, A Blind Life, tells his story.

And it's a radical journey, from childhood trauma to disability denial, to a rebellious and passionate advocacy for his community. I live a blind first existence now. I'm proud to be a person with a disability now, but as a young person, I was not. I had drunk the societal Kool-Aid on able to. and disability, and I was as ready as anyone to believe that people with disabilities were not as interesting as non-disabled people. Josh Mealy spoke with ideas producer Lisa Gottfried.

You sometimes say that your life's work is inventing cool things for blind people. What do you consider your coolest thing? That's like asking me, like, who's your favorite child, isn't it? All right. I have a favorite. favorite child then. To me, one of the coolest was T-Map. T-Map is also one of my absolute favorite. So I've always loved maps. And a lot of people say, oh, that's so interesting. You're a blind person and you think so visually. And I say, no, I don't think of things visually. I think of things spatially.

And of course, you can represent that with colors and ink and visual textures, but there's, there are other ways to do it too. And when I make tactile maps, I'm using raised lines and textures and braille for labeling and tactile markers for points of interest and so on. And so having always loved maps as a young scientist, one of the things that I captured my attention was the fact that in the early aughts,

all the sighted people had amazing access to digital street maps. for the first time, right? You didn't have to unfold your map from your glove box anymore. You could just go to the computer, and now I'm really showing how old I am, but you could just go to the computer and get any street map you wanted. And I wanted that for blind people, but we didn't have it. So I spent several years of my postdoc career building a thing called the Tactal Maps automated production system or T-Map, which took digital street data and automatically represented it as a tactile graphics. So it was something that you could print out using a braille printer or braille embosser.

You could take any street map that you wanted anywhere in the world pretty much and print it out on a piece of paper using braille and raised lines that you could feel so that for the first time, blind people could have access to the kind of street network information that was so ubiquitous for sighted people. And having tactile maps for the first time really gave us this God's eye view of a street network so that we could say, oh, I see why I, that street curves. I didn't realize that it had this gentle curve to it. That's why, you know, winds up going in this direction. Or, oh my God, that intersection is so complicated. No wonder it's so difficult to cross there.

Maybe I'll choose a simpler intersection, one block away that I can see on the map, and I'll cross there instead of at this complex and intimidating intersection. Not that blind people can't cross complex and intimidating intersections, but it is nice to have a little bit of simplicity to some of these situations.

You've said it's a pain in the neck to be a blind person, because there's a lot to learn and figure out. Much of the culture is developed first-sighted people. When in your life would you say you reached peak frustration with that reality? It happens every few days. I have become much more tolerant and patient as I have gotten older and more mature, but I still find things can be super irritating in the world as you travel around, as you commute, as you go from place to place as a blind person.

And most of it is frustration with sort of other people and their assumptions about what you can and can't do. I guess street signs, this was before we had good access to GPS on our phones. Now you can just ask your phone what the name of the street is that you're on. But back before we had that, there was really no information. and yet there were these signs posted high up on polls for sighted people to see, you know, from far away and get all of the information they needed. And so I started a campaign of climbing signs to read the labels because it turns out that the signs themselves are actually tactile.

They're either embossed on the metal or they've got these stencils of letters that you can actually feel. And so I was like, damn, I could just. climb up there and read the sign. And so I started doing that. I started, you know, carrying with me some equipment that would help me climb the signs. And it really freaked people out. It was sort of accessibility performance art in a lot of ways because it was such a hassle to do. And yet it was, it made it obvious to anybody looking what the problem was. And people with disabilities have a special tax.

on our time and effort. We call it the disability tax, and it is basically you just have to put in more effort to do fundamentally simple things, and getting access to information is one of the best examples of that for blind people. We have to put in so much extra effort, so much extra time,

just usually to get access to simple things that anybody else could just bring up on their screen and view. Earlier in your life, there was a period where in your book it seems like you were very determined not to be considered exceptional or outside the mainstream. Did you feel like you were just being yourself or were you being defiant? I don't think any kid wants to be different, right? At least not early on.

And, you know, so there's the desire to be. be like everyone else and then of course there's the desire to differentiate yourself from others and kids experience both of those things i wanted to be different but i didn't want to be different because i was burned and blind um you know i we haven't talked about it but i'm blind because i have i got burned as a young kid i have extensive facial scars and it's very evident to anybody who looks at me that i am not like other people and um and i really didn't like the idea of being forced to be different as a child. Wendell Jameson is the co-author of Connecting Dots, Joshua Meeley's memoir.

He's a journalist, a former neighbor of Josh's, and is now his friend. Wendell described the attack that Josh experienced as a four-year-old in an interview on the podcast totally booked in 2025. This excerpt is brief, but just to warn you, it does. describes a terrible act of violence. The way he became blind was sort of the shocking thing that happened when we were both growing up in Park Slope, Brooklyn in 1973. He answered the door of his family's brownstone, which was a few blocks from mine. And a neighbor who was mentally disturbed, poured acid on his head and blinded him and scarred him.

And this was a very big event. It was in the newspapers. It was extremely upsetting. I recall being seven years old when my mother, told me about this, and we didn't even know the Mealy's. And so when I was a journalist at the New York Times, I tracked down Josh, which is easy to do because he's quite notable and all over Google. And I wrote a story about this crime that had occurred a long time ago

and then the life he lived afterwards, which to my great happiness was quite a joyous and successful life. Still, in the aftermath, Josh endured many medical procedures. his parents were terribly stricken and wholly supportive. They eventually divorced, and Josh lived with his artist mother until he went off to college. He was given exactly the same freedoms as his siblings. I was the youngest of three kids in the 70s and 80s, and nobody was really minding the store.

I was allowed to do pretty much anything I wanted, my mom loved me very much, but she was not at all interested in containing me. She was interested in guiding me and advising me, but was not the kind of parent who would say, no, you can't do that. And that was great for me as a blind kid. Many blind kids suffer from having their parents put limits on them because their parents are afraid for their safety or have ablest assumptions about what blind people can and can't do, should and shouldn't do.

No, don't do that. Don't feel that. You look blind when you feel that offering these shame and fear-based restrictions on blind kids. My mother did an amazing job. My parents did an amazing job at not doing any of that.

But of course, sometimes it's smart to say no to kids or to put limits on them. And I'm afraid that a great deal of experimentation was done. And luckily, I survived. You roller skated. I roller skated, I took tons of acid, I, you know, spent nights out in the woods. There were all sorts of things that happened that were sort of unequivocally dangerous.

And yet, here I am. You know, some people are born blind, some people become progressively blind or experience low vision, and you were rendered blind, and it was a traumatic way to become disabled. and because of your facial difference, like strangers said ignorant things to you about your appearance. And my question out of that is simply, how did you keep your confidence up? I never even thought of not keeping my confidence up. I think that a huge part of it is just luck of the draw. My nature is resilient.

And I'm just lucky to have that. and I also am lucky to have had a supportive and loving family. The people that were closest to me weren't doing that. And of course, I come from privilege. Like I am, you know, a middle class, white American who doesn't have a lot of other isms going against him. You know, I'm lucky, I'm privileged, and I was not beaten down by the world in its sort of concerted effort to make me feel like a a person who wasn't an equal. Yeah.

I live a blind first existence now. I'm proud to be a person with a disability now, but as a young person, I was not. And I also was not at all proud to be disabled or blind. I didn't see any value in that. I had drunk the societal Kool-Aid on ableism and disability, and I was as ready as anyone to believe that people with disabilities were not as valuable as cool, as interesting, as smart, as worthy as non-disabled people. I learned differently when I went to college,

but as a young kid growing up, I thought I was the only cool blind person in the world. I thought other blind people were like, you know, I didn't want anything to do with other blind people. And it wasn't until I got to college at UC Berkeley that I met an incredible community of blind people who were smart, were funny, were obviously valuable and cool, and all of these other things. And it was transformational to me and my own identity. I realized that I was a disabled person.

I was a blind person and that that was something to be proud of, to be embraced, and to be connected with. And Berkeley was, of course, one of the epicenters of disability rights in the 1970s when all of that stuff was sort of positive. dropping off, by the way, with the support and I think inspiration of the Black Panthers and free speech movement and other amazing things that were happening here in the San Francisco Bay Area. But it was still in the air in Berkeley in the 80s when I showed up. Yeah. It seems to me you intersected with kind of a huge moment in the history of technology. Did you always feel that could be revolutionary for accessibility design? Yes. So technology is a two-edged sword for people with disabilities. The more innovation that happens, the more technologies get invented that are locking us out of stuff. So as a person who designs accessibility tools and ways to make technologies usable by people with disabilities and blind people, I feel like I have really good job security.

So it's a fun and interesting challenge to find the right path forward. The right solution for a problem two years ago isn't necessarily the right solution for an accessibility problem today because we have new possible tools to use. And at the same time, just because you have new technologies doesn't necessarily mean that they are the right answer. You don't have to use the shiniest, fanciest new AI model. to do some of the most fundamental accessibility work. And in fact, if you do, you're sort of probably setting yourself up for more problems.

The simplest solution is usually the best, and very often those simple solutions have been around for a very long time. In 2019, you left academia in the world of research and grants and went into what some would consider the dark side, big tech, Amazon. why? I was working at a research institute where I was entirely funded on grant money. And at that time, in the late teens, mid-teens, more and more people were applying for fewer and fewer grants that were for less and less money and had more and more reporting requirements. So I felt like it was an area of diminishing returns. And I also wasn't finding that I was getting funded for the

kind of work that I wanted to do. And I also was feeling like I hadn't, the work that I was doing, like, you know, T-Map and you describe and wear Braille, these are, you know, sort of tools that I developed at Smith-Kettlewell, you know, the research institution where I was. And they would be used by, you know, hundreds of people maybe, which was cool. But I had this idea that if I went into big tech, I had the potential to improve things for thousands or millions of people. I wanted to sort of try to scale my impact. And even though big tech is in many ways a social and cultural challenge to what many of us are trying to achieve in society, it is unarguable that they are huge forces in our world.

and I thought, if I can make Amazon a more accessible place, if I can make it so that more blind people can use Amazon services more easily and feel like these services are designed with blind people and people with disabilities in mind, I'll be doing good in the world, even if not everything that Amazon does is doing good in the world. And I think that one of the other things that I think is kind of an interesting thing, to grapple with is that the things that Amazon does, grocery and product delivery, online shopping,

things like Alexa, these are all things that are nice for many people, but actually enable people with disabilities and blind people in unique and powerful ways. People who can't make it to the store can still shop. People who can't go to the movies or who find it too frustrating to get audio description at a theater can stream it at home comfortably and get the access they need. Voice assistants like Alexa provide an incredible amount of flexibility and even freedom for people with limited dexterity or blind people or people with other types of disabilities. So there's this real benefit to the things that the giant tech companies are doing benefits for people with disabilities. It doesn't mean that it's without consequence or without consideration.

But it's part of the consideration. And we really need to think about the big picture in what we think of as doing good in the world. There's so much criticism around everybody becoming too dependent on technology and losing the capacity to, say, read maps if you're a sighted person, read visual maps and things like that. People can't find their way around anymore. Is there any potential downside for children and younger people who are blind now becoming totally dependent on technology? Absolutely. And this is what I was talking about before when I was saying that just because you can do something with technology doesn't mean that that's the right way to do it. So there are so many people who want to build, you know, AI-based navigation tools, AI tools with, you know, smart glasses that can help you cross the street or, you know, avoid obstacles or find,

a storefront. And in fact, if you're blind, I'm blind and I'm already doing all of those things and I'm not using AI. And I'm using skills that I have developed as a blind person to navigate in the world, to cross streets, to find storefronts, to avoid obstacles. Learning to do these things without technology is really fundamental to being an independent, capable blind person. And so there are, you know, There are people today, not just young people, but many people who don't develop the fundamental skills that would really serve them well. And that, by the way, includes reading Braille. A lot of people think, oh, I don't need to learn Braille. I can just, you know, use a computer, can just talk to me. And that is true. But there are things that Braille can do that a talking computer simply can't.

Representing equations is one of them. Taking music notation is another one. And also just the pleasure of reading, for example, poetry, where you can see where the line breaks are, the punctuation where you can, if you're reading it in Braille, you can see how the formatting of the poem is done. And you can't do that when someone is reading a poem. Voice over on Chrome. The road not taken by Robert Frost. Two roads diverged in a yellow wood. And sorry I could not travel both and be one traveler. Long I stood and looked down one as far as I could to wear it bent in the undergrowth. From the white cane to revolutionary apps, technology offers independence to those with vision loss.

That's very important. But so is human connection. It made all the difference for Josh Mealy. The best thing you can do as a blind person who moves confidently through the world is to feel confidence as a blind person. And I think that the best way to do that is to me. make friends with other blind people who are on a similar journey. The fewer blind friends you have, the less connection you have, the less community you have, the fewer people you have to bounce questions off of and discuss possible solutions.

A blind friend group is really powerful in getting rid of your negative feelings about blindness and getting rid of your negative feelings about blindness is the single most empowering thing you can do as a blind traveler in the world. Theater artist Alex Bulmer has been considering the power of connection too. In her case, experimenting with the ways that blind and sighted people can interact as they move together. She's been gathering material for a performance called, May I Take Your Arm? The project first started in, oh, it was in 2018 when I moved back to Canada from the UK. I moved back to Toronto and I moved to a neighborhood I'd never been to before, never lived in before.

I was a bit stunned and disappointed that I'd come home and it didn't feel like home. And I tried the regular roots of learning where I am. I had some mobility lessons to learn which way the streets move and where the shops were. And I had a tactile map made. But it still felt like a completely meaningless empty space. So I asked a friend of mine who runs a community arts company if he would work with me on something so that I could develop a sense of place. And we developed an idea that I would walk with a whole bunch of people that he knew of because he lived in the neighborhood. And his community arts company had worked with lots of people in the neighborhood who'd lived there for years and all had really interesting different stories to tell.

So the idea was that I would develop a sense of place through walking and talking with people I'd never met before who would tell me stories about living there. So that's what we did. And I asked each person I walked with was given the prompt to choose a route that had meaning for them for whatever reason and walk with me for about 45 minutes. And that's what we did. And we recorded it. And I knew nothing about any of these people. I knew nothing about anyone before I opened my mouth and said, may I take it? your arm and they knew nothing really about me other than this is what I wanted to do. And so I took their arm and we would walk. And I truly don't know if those stories would have been told if we'd sat down across a table from each other, you know, there's something about walking side by side, the physical contact I have with people when I take their arm. You know, that's a big barrier right there. Because we don't normally touch each other. So I think that opens something. There's a giving of trust and a receiving of trust that I think is a softening. I think that softens both of us. If you had to talk

to blind and low vision people who might be listening, what is your best advice to them on how a balance, being adventurous, exploring, getting out there, and staying safe. I think the idea of safety and adventure and fear, you know, do you kneel down to it or do you get in front of it, I think that is such an individual choice. I assess situations very, very quickly and carefully to determine if it's safe. And I don't always get it right. Mostly I do. I'm not talking about with people because I really do find a lot is communicated through the human voice, but maybe more just environments. You know, I fall. I think we learn from those falls. But I think it's such an individual choice, you know, and to never feel shame or ashamed.

that you might need to ask for help. We're interdependent beings, this idea that independence is somehow the Holy Grail. I understand that we need to pursue independence. It's a form of empowerment and self-knowledge, but to the point that we're refusing to recognize how interdependent we really are with each other is not going to do anybody any favors.

It's not going to help. And don't feel so bad. if things go wrong. Learn. Try again. And there is no one right way. We're all different. Blindness are cited.

Joshua Mili's memoir is called Connecting Dots, a Blind Life. Alex Bomer's play, Perceptual Archaeology, is published in her co-edited collection, rebellious bodies, and radical acts. Excerpts from the Victorian travel writing of James Holman were read

by Pete Mori. This Ideas episode was produced by Lisa Godfrey. Technical production by Danielle Duval and Johnny Casamatta. Thanks also to recording engineers Jabari Tawiya and Rye Allen in Berkeley, California. Lisa Ayuso is Ideas web producer. Our senior producer is Nicola Luxchich. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of ideas. And I'm Nala Ayyid.

For more CBC Podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.