Joshua Miele
Joshua A. Miele (born 1969) is an American scientist and inventor who specializes in adaptive technology design. Since 2019, Miele has been a Principal Accessibility Researcher at Amazon Lab126, a subsidiary of Amazon that works on hardware products. Before assuming his current position, Miele conducted research on tactile graphics and auditory displays at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute for fifteen years. Among his work at Smith-Kettlewell is Tactile Map Automated Production, a web application for generating tactile maps of streets printable with a braille embosser, and YouDescribe, a web platform for creating and listening to audio  descriptions of YouTube videos. He received a MacArthur Fellowship in 2021. Early life. Joshua A. Miele was born in New York in 1969, the son of Isabella and Jean Miele. At the age of four, he was blinded in an acid attack outside of his home. Through his childhood, he underwent surgeries for his burns and blindness. Miele recalls his mother wanted him to be "as active and engaged with the world as possible" growing up and encouraged him to feel art in museums. Electronics and model kits that his mother bought for his birthdays lacked accessible instructions, so he  would attempt to build them through trial and error. Miele's father worked as an architect. When Miele was six or seven years old, he would play with floor plans and layout tape in his father's office. His stepfather, a geophysicist, is also a strong influence. Miele attended the Industrial Home for the Blind for kindergarten. In the first grade he was mainstreamed into the public school system, where he was taught by the same teacher, from the third grade through high school, who transcribed all of his learning materials into braille. He took classes in chemistry and biology  in high school and in 1987 applied to study physics at the University of California, Berkeley. Education. At the University of California, Berkeley, Miele studied with other visually impaired students and described going through classes with "almost no negative experiences" with his professors. Initially desiring to be a rocket scientist, Miele took an internship at NASA. One semester prior to graduation, he paused his education to work at Berkeley Systems, then a start-up developing Macintosh computer software to be accessible to blind people; he helped develop their OutSpoken screen reader software for the Microsoft Windows operating system. Miele returned  to university to finish his physics degree and completed a summer internship at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco, where he designed and developed accessible technology for visually impaired people. When Berkeley Systems was sold in 1996, Miele debated whether he should start a company or pursue a PhD in policymaking. His mentor from Smith-Kettlewell, Bill Gerrey, recommended Miele work as a scientist and obtain a degree in experimental psychology instead. Miele then began a doctorate in psychoacoustics at Berkeley. His PhD studies focused on auditory motion perception—perception of the direction and speed in which  sounds are traveling through hearing. Through his studies he worked with the numerical computation software package MATLAB, developing tools for reproducing bar charts and other graphic information created by MATLAB in auditory and tactile formats. Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. Miele returned to the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute under a predoctoral fellowship, and after earning his PhD in 2003, completed a postdoctoral fellowship which ultimately led to a full-time position as a scientist. He acted as a principal investigator on some of the organization's projects and was associate director of research and development from 2007 to 2019 . Using funding from the U.S. Office of Special Education Programs, Smith-Kettlewell opened its Video Description Research and Development Center (VDRDC) in 2011, with Miele as its director. By the time Miele left Smith-Kettlewell in 2019, he had worked for the organization for more than fifteen years. In 2021, Miele was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship "for his inventions giving blind and visually impaired people access to everyday technology"; the award citation highlighted his Tactile Map Automated Production, WearaBraille, and YouDescribe projects. Tactile graphics. In 2003, Miele began developing the Tactile Map Automated Production (TMAP) Project, a web application capable  of producing tactile maps of streets suitable for printing with a braille embosser. Miele later worked with the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco, to create tactile maps of the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART). In developing a concept, Miele adapted a Livescribe digital pen to read off relevant information after the user taps a certain part of a tactile map, like which buses come through each bus stop. The LightHouse formally implemented Miele's concept following a four-year process which involved software design and testing, surveying transportation services, and building  the maps. Distribution of the maps for use by teachers and other consumers began in 2014. Maps produced with TMAP were featured in a 2018 exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. In 2018, the National Federation of the Blind presented LightHouse with its Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award for the development of TMAP. Audio description. A major project of the Video Description Research and Development Center (VDRDC) was the development a web platform, named YouDescribe, where volunteers can watch YouTube videos and record accompanying audio descriptions; users can then watch the videos using the crowdsourced audio descriptions. In order to  gauge the popularity of audio description and obtain feedback through focus groups, Miele and his research group attended meetings of the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind in 2012. The website was launched in 2014. That year, Miele began hosting the annual Describeathon, a one-day event held at Smith-Kettlewell during which people recorded audio descriptions. Several weeks later, the United States Federal Communications Commission (FCC) awarded Miele the FCC Chair's Award for Advancement in Accessibility. Other projects. An early project at Smith-Kettlewell is WearaBraille, gloves that allow interaction with a  smartphone by tapping braille on a hard surface. The WearaBraille functions wirelessly and can be used to send text messages, open applications, and answer phone calls. Miele also developed a basic iPhone application for blind wayfinding named overTHERE and in 2015 founded the Blind Arduino Project, a group of blind students and hobbyists involved with the maker movement focused on designing their own technological devices. Amazon. Miele left Smith-Kettlewell at the beginning of 2019, and joined Amazon Lab126 as a Principal Accessibility Researcher. In this position he works on improving the usability of Amazon's website and devices for  visually impaired people. Personal life. Miele lives in Berkeley, California with his wife and two children. He has two siblings; his older sister, Julia Miele Rodas, is a writer and professor at Bronx Community College. Miele plays the bass for services at a Jewish spiritual community in Berkeley. From 2011 to 2015, Miele served as president of the board of the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired. Selected works. Conference papers. Source: