For more than a year I’ve been attending monthly Lighthouse Labs meetups at San Francisco’s Lighthouse for the Blind. Each month Lighthouse Labs holds an open forum for accessibility technologists to present and receive feedback. These are my notes from an audience retrospective of a year of these presentations:

  • Working with new learners:
    • What tech do you currently have?
    • What do you want to do that you currently can’t? “Based on life. “
    • “Its ok to say Blind. How exhausting is it to hear people talk around for 15 minutes trying not to say the B-word?”
  • Advice for inventors and presenters:
    • No more remote assistance
    • No more buzzing wearables
    • No more cane solutions
    • Keep it simple.
    • Make your website accessible
    • If they think they have a product for the blind, ask them what research they’ve done. Should we be patient zero? And if so, they should be aware of what that means.
    • What is the end goal of what you’re presenting? How do you intend to effect a person’s life? Example: “be more independent”, but in what way? It might be too open or predictable; how bizarre it could go. Answer: “How do you intend to enrich someone’s life?”
    • Why do you think your life solution is better than others? Eg why is it better than a cane?
    • Don’t: Try to solve a problem that blind people don’t need solved.
    • Have a list of how blind people already do stuff.
    • Bring appropriate audio-media, and understand it well enough to connect it to the presentation room.
    • “Yeah, that idea was terrible. But they were young, full of ideas and open to feedback”
    • “It is exhausting to say every month, we have canes and they’re fine.”