Joshua A. Miele 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. He is a 2021 MacArthur Fellow, Distinguished Fellow of Disability, Accessibility, and Design at UC Berkeley’s Othering and Belonging Institute, and an Amazon Design Scholar focusing on accessible experiences for Amazon Devices. He has a bachelor’s degree in physics and a Ph.D. in psychoacoustics from the University of California at Berkeley.
For over 20 years, Dr. Miele was based at the Smith-Kettlewell Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Blindness and Low Vision in San Francisco. There he led a team of engineers, scientists, and students dedicated to addressing a wide variety of accessible information challenges in education, employment, and entertainment. His accessibility creations, then and now, focus on the use of affordable emerging technologies and ideas to address a wide range of social and information accessibility challenges. These include tactile maps and graphics, digital spatial information, video and audio description, data sonification, AI and ML promises and threats, and inclusive, accessible design challenges of all descriptions.
Josh lives in Berkeley, California, where he enjoys hiking, cooking, reading hard SF, making sawdust, and eating as many oysters as possible with his friends and family.
