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 2021 MacArthur Foundation ‘genius’ fellow. In the 1990s, as an undergraduate and graduate student at the University of California, Berkeley (UCB) — before the invention of GPS — 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. “Some 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,” says Miele.
Structural biology for researchers with low vision
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 “feel it with his hands”.
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 “practise breaking the rules, thinking about when they needed to be broken and practising being visible, all of which are essential for me now”, 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’s careers team at his neat, compact woodworking studio in Berkeley, where he goes “to get out of his head”, carving chopstick holders and other things.
Outspoken start
Miele wasn’t born blind — 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: “I had a life to enjoy, and I couldn’t let being blind and burned prevent it.”
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’s house. At age 12, with a friend’s 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 “about a computer hacker guy with a talking computer” and with the help of his Braille teacher, Miele set up a speech synthesizer as a rudimentary screen reader on his home computer.
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’s graphical user interface. The Mac version was originally released in 1989 by Berkeley Systems, a small, local software company.
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