Photo: STEPHEN LAM/AMAZON
Dr. Joshua Mieleis used to confounding expectations. He is blind, but he — and not hissighted wife— is the chef at home.
“The kids get very worried when Mom is going to cook,” he jokes to PEOPLE.
And when Miele walks the streets in his Berkeley, Calif. neighborhood, he does so not with timid exploration, but with a bold stride. “He walks faster than the average sighted person,” his wife, Liz, says.
His pace, she explains, is a metaphor for his approach to life: “He walks through the world joyfully, with a sense of ‘Yes’.”
But Miele, now 53, frames his history differently.
courtesy Miele family
“I have spent a lot of time and energy trying to get people to recognize that it was not a tragedy or horror show. It’s just the way things turned out,” he says. “Yes, it was painful, yes it completely changed my life. I am now burned and I wasn’t before. But I want parents of blind children and parents of disabled children to know that this is not a tragedy. It is just a challenge. It is something that people just have to get through.”
“In the blind community there are so many technological barriers,” says Miele’s longtime friend Bryan Bashin, CEO of San Francisco’sLighthouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. “Josh is a dreamer and he’s relentless in finding work-arounds and ways to do good in the world.”
courtesy amazon
Miele’s work, which he developed while at the non-profitSmith Kettlewell Eye Research Instituteand, more recently, in his current position as a principal accessibility researcher at Amazon, earned him aMacArthur “Genius Grant"last fall, an award “I dreamed of, literally — every nerd has,” says Miele.
But Miele, who studied physics at University of California, Berkeley, where he also earned a doctorate in psychoacoustics, didn’t set out to be a designer of accessible technologies — “I wanted to be a space scientist,” he says.
While he did do an internship at NASA, he quickly realized that the tools a scientist needs for measuring, recording and analyzing data were not easy forsomeone who was blindto use.
“The world was not serving me in the way I wanted and I realized that if I was going to have the tools I needed, I had to design them myself,” he says.
Today, he teaches soldering to blind students in hopes that they can build their own computerized technologies and become a bigger presence in STEM fields.With the $625,000 prize that comes with the MacArthur grant, he’ll be able to do even more for the blind and disabled communities, including creating an open-source foundation to share accessibility research.
“Putting it completely unvarnished, it’s a pain in the ass to have a disability,” he says. “So anytime it’s easier for people with disabilities to do something, it is a delight. I have a lot of plans — a much longer list than I think I can achieve in my lifetime.”
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source: people.com
