[NFBMT] Where The Bats Hung Out

[BRUCE&JOY BRESLAUER]

Where the bats hung out': 

How a basement hideaway at UC Berkeley nurtured a generation of blind
innovators

March 28, 2022

 

BERKELEY, Calif. - If, in the fall of 1987, you found yourself at the
University of California, Berkeley, and you made your way through the
sloping, verdant campus to Moffitt Library, you could walk through the doors
and take two flights of stairs down to the basement.  Turn right and you
would find a door tucked in the corner - room 224, though the placard isn't
written in braille. After unlocking the door using a key with a ridged top,
you'd walk through a small lobby with tables, chairs, and a "sofa" made of
seats pulled from a van. The smell of lived-in-ness, a mix of takeout and
coffee and books, permeates the cramped space and makes the tip of your nose
perk up.

 

This is how Joshua Miele and other blind students found their way to this
underground hideaway. Its university-sanctioned name was the blind students
study center. But pretty much everyone called it The Cave. "It's where the
bats hung out," Miele explained. 

 

It was loosely organized, loosely supervised; if it was run by anyone, it was
the students.

A physics major from New York state, Miele was a freshman that year. He spent
hours every day in one of eight bunker-like rooms lining The Cave's
windowless hallway, studying, running his fingertips along pages of braille,
and dictating his homework to a reader who transcribed it. Today, he's a
MacArthur "genius grant" winner who builds adaptive technologies at Amazon,
work that has made it an industry-wide expectation that consumer devices are
accessible to people who are blind and have other disabilities. 

He is just one of a generation of leaders, innovators, creatives, and
geniuses who are reshaping the world - and have roots in The Cave.

We like to tell ourselves that geniuses go it alone. When a success story
involves a person with a disability, it is often framed as an act of
overcoming, an inspiring tale of perseverance in the face of unimaginable
tragedy: losing a sense or gaining an impediment. But the story of The Cave
shows quite the opposite, that genius is forged by community, in the sharing
of information, tools, and resources. That disability is not a curse. 

That same fall at "Cal," there was also Marc Sutton, a tech whiz and
sixth-year student in the room across the hall from Miele. Sutton was
majoring in environmental studies after finding computer science classes and
professors unwelcoming to a blind person. A botany professor had shut him out
of his class because he "couldn't benefit" from the hands-on lab work - it
was before the landmark Americans with Disabilities Act outlawed such
discrimination - so he started giving tours to blind people at a botanical
garden.

 

Sutton works at Apple now, finding software bugs and designing solutions that
make it possible for blind people to use Apple products, like phones and
computers. Others in the expansive Cave network went on to become pioneers in
their fields - running major nonprofits, classrooms, and adventure tours for
the blind, writing books, practicing law, serving on presidential
commissions, and pushing the disability rights movement into the 21st
century. Many of them point to The Cave as the place where they found a
certain power, learned how to cut through discriminatory bureaucracy, and
felt deeply understood for the first time. They saw new possibilities for
themselves in the other Cave dwellers, living examples that contradicted the
narrative they were fed by a world that's hostile to difference. At Berkeley,
students who were ostracized in their hometowns, often for being the only
blind kid around, became part of a rich lineage, and a vast disability
community.

It was in The Cave that Miele learned that having a disability didn't mean
inhabiting a broken body. And it was where Miele said he started to become
aware of "design and assumptions" - how his world was shaped by "ableist
thought behind who's in control of the tools that we use, whether those tools
are intersection controls or building entrances or computer technology." 

A graduate program, a street curb, a home, a workplace - anything - that is
created without disability in mind will exclude people with disabilities by
design. "The assumptions that go into it perpetuate the ability of certain
people to be privileged to use it and others not," he said.

In The Cave, Miele and his classmates learned they could challenge those
assumptions. They could design a world for themselves. So they did. 

 

Be subversive

Miele didn't pick Berkeley for its activism. "I came to Berkeley for the
physics, and stayed for the disability," he said. 

He grew up in Brooklyn, and later Rockland County, north of New York City,
where he felt "most kids were afraid of me because I was different, and, for
the first time in my life, I had classmates who thought it was fun to mess
with the blind kid," he said. "I'm stronger because of it, but it wasn't much
fun." His thoughts frequently strayed from the terrestrial world. He devoured
all of the braille books his classroom bookshelf held about outer space and
told his teacher there was nothing else to read. (He interned at NASA while
he was at Berkeley.)

Arriving in the Bay Area as an 18-year-old, Miele didn't think of himself as
a person with a disability. He had gone to a camp for blind children in
Vermont when he was young, but that was his only real exposure to other blind
people. All the examples of blind people in the media were "bumbling fools,"
he said, and he wasn't that. 

"I was a total ableist before I came to Berkeley. I believed, sort of had
these unquestioned assumptions about disability that were just as bad as
anybody else," he said. 

Miele never lacked confidence, but he wasn't yet secure in being blind. Into
adulthood, he tried to avoid being "blinky" at all costs. That is, he cringed
at people who acted "stereotypically blind," who felt people's faces or
talked loudly on the bus, or smacked their canes hard against the ground.
They took up too much space, they gave blind people a bad reputation, Miele
thought. 

At Berkeley, Miele realized that he "didn't have to have contempt for that
behavior, that it was just my fellow blind people trying to make it," he
said.

 

Like a lot of young adults, students in The Cave wanted to get out of their
hometowns, out from under well-intentioned, overprotective parents. Berkeley,
as a safe harbor for outcasts of all kinds, was their chance. 

Sutton had craved something different from the "sterility" of growing up in
middle-class, suburban San Jose, Calif. He was bused to school with other
blind kids and students with disabilities, but he was in class with mostly
sighted kids. He felt isolated from both sets of peers. On the bus, he
thought, sure, he was blind, but he wasn't like these other kids with severe
disabilities. And at school, he was uncomfortable with the sighted kids. "For
me, it took really until I got to Berkeley" to find his sweet spot, he said. 

"People became adults at The Cave," said Lucy Greco, who was hired in 2005 to
supervise the center. "It was a rite of passage being there. It was a very
valuable part of their life."

Miele went through his own learning curve. He got a guide dog, a yellow lab
named Xilo, the summer before college because he thought that's what blind
people did. It took him three years to finally just use a cane, like most of
his blind friends, to navigate through the world.

Students got keys to The Cave, so they were there all at all hours, immersed
in homework, talking to a reader, or comparing notes on professors. They ate
cheap meals, planned pranks - like shipping a box of rotten fruit to a Cave
supervisor using an extremely slow, low-cost courier for blind people - and
crammed into study rooms to pass around joints with the lights off, "because
no one could see or, the people who could see some, it was like, too bad,"
Sutton said. 

 

Miele also spent hours at another Berkeley library, in a room full of maps,
running his fingers over a 6-foot-wide model of the campus to learn his way
around. Anytime he had to go somewhere new, he'd figure out the best route on
the model. He discovered very young that maps helped him learn. Rockland
County was a "sidewalk-less, transit-less suburbia," in stark contrast to his
native Brooklyn, which made it tough for a blind kid to get around on his
own. Then he found a book of maps he could feel with his small fingers -
trails and lakes and other interesting textures he hadn't yet felt with his
feet. 

When Miele stood in the library as an undergraduate, feeling the contours of
mini Berkeley, many cognitive scientists still believed blind people couldn't
use street maps. It was, in a way, a subversive act. Reading that map planted
a seed. Decades later, he would invent a way for blind people to print
tactile maps of any city in the United States and, eventually, the world.

While still in school, he got a job at Berkeley Systems, a small software
company where Sutton worked. 

There was a crisis brewing at the time, in the early 1990s. The most common
computer operating system was text-based, meaning blind people could use
screen readers on them. But the world began to shift toward graphical Windows
and Apple systems, with visually complex interfaces that required a mouse for
navigation. Screen readers weren't yet ready for the multiple windows and
overlapping visual elements, like buttons and check boxes and lists and
tables. "So blind people were definitely feeling like, oh, we just made some
progress and now we're going to lose it," said Sutton. 

In response, Berkeley Systems developed Outspoken, the first screen reader
for Mac computers. Miele was hired to do tech support and software testing,
and then his job expanded to include marketing, technical writing, and
customer service, walking users through how to use the new tool.

Working there was exhilarating. "I'm the guy that's helping figure out how
blind people are going to use the next generation of computers," he
remembered thinking. "That's badass. That's really fun." It was a feeling
that would transport him from one ambitious project to the next over the next
30 years. 

 

Miele remembers clearly how he met Sutton. Miele was struggling to get rid of
some stubborn formatting in a document, and others in The Cave suggested he
ask Sutton for help. "Hey, man, I have some chips and avocado. You want
some?" Sutton said in greeting when Miele popped into his sparsely decorated
office. And then he told Miele exactly how to fix the document. "It was like
he'd pulled this secret code out of his head," Miele recalled.

In the year they overlapped at Berkeley, Sutton and Miele formed a friendship
of contrast. Miele was bold and unafraid of conflict, while Sutton was
nonconfrontational and shy. They had developed different strategies for
handling people's ignorance about blindness. For Miele, it was often
impatience - just get out of my way. Sutton tended to let things slide off
his back, and generally wanted as little attention on him as possible. "He
kind of infused me with some boldness that I wasn't quite full of," Sutton
said, "and I probably infused him with some tact."

The Cave was where iron sharpened iron, academically - tricks for surviving
Berkeley were as much a currency as smart readers and cheap weed - but also
personally. A rotating cast of characters, readers as well as students,
created its unique synergy and chaos. 

"I'm the guy that's helping figure out how blind people are going to use the
next generation of computers. That's badass. That's really fun."

JOSHUA MIELE

Berkeley's Disabled Students' Program gave students a stipend for hiring
people to read their textbooks aloud, record books on tape, or type their
homework. But the students were in charge of hiring their readers, and
managing their hours and assignments, and they quickly learned who was good
at what.  Among the most memorable of the eccentrics in The Cave was the MIT
dropout who smelled like pipe tobacco, "coughed like death," and, as Miele
remembers it, had severe obsessive-compulsive tendencies, but whose physics
tutoring single-handedly helped him graduate. 

Because blind people have to work so much harder to complete basic tasks,
they played hard, too. Students would bring a stack of books for their
readers and a six-pack of beer for when they finished. If they worked
overnight on an assignment, they would take shots of liquor in the morning,
and never alone. It was a bit like "a co-ed blind frat, just in the partying
sense," Miele said. 

A Cave staff member remembers one finals week when the air conditioning broke
and the student suite was sweltering. So a student pulled off his pants and
worked in his underwear, knowing a lot of people in there couldn't see him
anyway. 

This unregulated, ad hoc organization of things made for a certain magic.
Once things are systematized, neatly sorted into bureaucratic hierarchies,
"you're not in charge," Sutton said. "We got to be in charge."

A main attraction was The Cave's slate of tools. It was the only place on
campus where students could access a wide array of special technology that
let them do their work at the academic clip that's required at one of the top
public schools in the country. 

They could type search terms into a talking computer terminal that would then
read them books, articles, and other materials from the library's catalogs
and databases - pre-internet. It was the only such terminal on campus,
hard-earned by Sutton, who convinced a computer science professor to set
aside a few thousand dollars in the department's budget for the gadget. 

 

A CCTV would blow up text on a screen, big enough that those with low vision
could read independently with greater ease, instead of straining to decipher
minuscule text with their faces inches from the page. The Cave had
bookshelves full of reel-to-reel and cassette tapes of frequently used books.
It had an early Kurzweil Reading Machine, which could scan, digitize, and
read back pages of text out loud. A Thermoform machine was used to press warm
copies of braille text and - it didn't take long for a bunch of college
students to figure out - make grilled cheese sandwiches.

"There was a part of me that was also very envious of them," said Greco, who
is blind. "I saw all the work that we did advocating for ourselves when we
were younger was paying off." 

Coincidentally, she purchased one of the first few copies of the screen
reader Miele and Sutton worked on at Berkeley Systems. When she moved from
Canada to the Bay Area with her husband, she didn't know anyone in town
"except for these two guys that would answer the phone occasionally" at the
company when she called for help. One day, she explained her situation to
Miele, and asked if they could meet for dinner: "He said, 'Sure, Just look
for the guy with lots of scarring on his face.'" 

 

Miele knew from an early age that he stood out. A mentally ill neighbor
poured acid on him when he was 4 years old, burning much of his face and
making him blind. But he never wanted that day to dominate his life. It took
him years to let that story be told in its entirety. 

Unsure of how to reconcile his inner self with the outward appearance people
judged him by, Miele was determined to let his work define him instead. "I
always wanted it to be sort of like, 'Oh, Josh is all these things and he
also happens to be blind and burned,'" he said. 

 

He's been an inventor and an educator, and board chair of the San Francisco
LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, whose CEO is another Cave
alumnus, Bryan Bashin. In his free time, Miele wrote a coding script (shared
on GitHub) that turns jazz chord charts into braille, so he could learn to
play jazz on his bass guitar with an old friend from The Cave. 

 

His invention of TMAP, formally Tactile Maps Automated Production, grew out
of two insights. First he had to figure out how to use MATLAB, a product
engineers and scientists use to analyze and visualize data, for his graduate
work in psychoacoustics, the study of how people perceive sound. It took him
six months to modify the program to present data with sound and tactile
models, instead of visuals. And he realized he could then use his version of
MATLAB to benefit more people.

 

While working at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, he pulled
geographic data of downtown Berkeley, turned it into a format that could be
embossed on paper, and sent it to a printer. The first time, it was more or
less gibberish. But with a tweak to one line of code, he got what he wanted. 

"I pushed the button, I held my breath, I pulled the sheet out of the printer
and looked at the map and was like, 'Oh, my God, this was a map that was made
by a computer because of a software I wrote,'" he said. "And I realized at
the time, this is going to change everything."

 

Anybody with access to a tactile printer or embosser can use the tools he
built to plug in a location on the TMAP website and print out a raised map,
giving them confidence that they can navigate independently - just as he had
used the Berkeley model many years earlier. "That implies blind people want
to go places," he said. "It implies that blind people are going to be walking
around, by themselves, without being led around by somebody."

Now, at age 53, he is a MacArthur "genius," working on any number of
accessibility projects at Amazon. 

"It's just been the most exciting time of my professional life in the last
decade," he said. 

What used to be pet projects and small-scale endeavors are now tools that are
used by people around the world, and they set inclusion benchmarks for
everyone else in the tech world. He built YouDescribe, a searchable platform
where people can upload audio descriptions of YouTube videos. YouDescribe has
users in 152 countries, and will have close to 5,000 described videos -
ranging from music videos to full movies and instructionals - by the end of
2022, according to data collected by Smith-Kettlewell. 

Miele also dreamed up WearaBraille, a device that lets users type out text
messages in braille by tapping their fingers on any surface using a virtual
wireless keyboard controlled by motion-detecting finger loops. And the free
wayfinding app, overTHERE, which he hopes to update and revive with the
MacArthur recognition, which offers him a sizable five-year grant to spend on
whatever he wants. 

His work at Amazon has contributed to the creation of rich braille and
tactile interfaces on the company's screen readers, tablets, and even
microwave ovens. He helped design Alexa's Show and Tell feature, which lets
users identify items as they unpack groceries and cook, by holding them up to
an Echo Show device. And Miele helps lead Amazon's effort to create a robust
library of audio descriptions for Prime Video. 

Miele's heart and genius, said Peter Korn, a longtime colleague and director
of accessibility at Amazon Lab126, are in designing "innovative and
delightful experiences." 

 

Build a chorus

Berkeley had long been home to a significant - and revolutionary - disability
community. This is the city where the disability rights movement was born,
and became a formidable political force, successfully advocating for passage
of the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990 and other reforms. Berkeley
was the birthplace of the National Federation of the Blind, started by law
professor Jacobus tenBroek, whose analysis provided some of the legal
foundation for important civil rights legislation and the Supreme Court's
Brown v. Board of Education ruling. 

the Center for Independent Living. BANCROFT LIBRARY

This city was home to mathematician Newel Perry, who started the California
Council of the Blind, and Judy Heumann, a powerhouse disability rights
organizer. The Center for Independent Living, which was kickstarted by Ed
Roberts in Berkeley, was an offshoot of the school's program for disabled
students, and was the first organization created to help people with
disabilities to live how they wanted.

All were still around - in flesh or in spirit - when Miele showed up. The
movement was still "ringing in the culture," he said, especially in the way
members of The Cave supported one another. Jim Gammon saw it firsthand. In
1982, he had been working for two years as a Cave supervisor (though, in his
early 30s, Gammon was more like another classmate) when he saw a job opening
as an intake coordinator at the Berkeley School of Optometry. After speaking
with other blind people working at low-vision clinics, he decided he could do
the job with some accommodations, and applied.

But Gammon never got an interview. Instead, he got a call from the clinic eye
doctor, who said he wouldn't consider Gammon for the job because "there's no
way" a blind person could do it, Gammon recalled. He filed a grievance with
his labor union, and he told the students in The Cave. "And they got all
steamed up about it," and marched on the university chancellor's office at
California Hall with signs that said, 'UC Screws the Blind' and 'UC Has No
Vision,'" Gammon said. The students saw him as an elder, a future version of
themselves, unable to get a better job because he was underestimated for his
disability. 

Sutton was part of that protest. He remembers "making a ruckus" in the heart
of campus, informing passersby of the optometry school's "huge hypocrisy." It
could only be worse if the Disabled Students' Program itself was rejecting a
blind job applicant, he thought. 

 

Even though he arrived at Berkeley five years later, Miele heard about
Gammon's story, and "saw it as a cautionary tale." He resolved to never let
that happen to him. 

 

In the end, Gammon was vindicated at a hearing, and the clinic got a slap on
the wrist for discriminating against him. But it showed how the students were
willing to raise hell for a supervisor - and for each other - because they
knew they were likely to face similar hurdles if they didn't address them in
the moment. 

 

If a department refused to buy talking computers so people who were blind or
had low vision could use them, students from The Cave banded together to
create a chorus of squeaky wheels. If a professor wasn't accommodating, they
would coach one another on how to push back. And if it came down to it, they
knew they had a whole community of people backing them up. Much of that era's
accessibility infrastructure - if it could be called that - was grassroots,
scrappy, and done by sheer force. 

 

In the decades that followed, the demands were less about access to basic
accommodations and legal protections (though those issues haven't gone away),
and more about social inclusion and true equity. 

 

Some estimates place the number of people with a disability at 15% of the
world's population, with a large share of that group living in poverty. Yet
disability is often left out of conversations about justice, equality, and
human dignity. So for Miele, it meant so much to see his name on the list of
MacArthur fellows, alongside that of journalists documenting the fight for
liberation, scientists scouring for disease clues and cures, and some of the
foremost artists of our time. 

 

"We're talking about incarceration, we're talking about borderlands and the
injustices and inequities of our society around race and class and gender,"
he said. "And the fact that my work is included in that list is a really
exciting signal to me from the world via the MacArthur Foundation that
accessibility and disability equity are worthy of being in that lineup. And I
know that. And the people that I work with everyday know that."

 

As a matter of equity, it's important to Miele that whatever he creates is
available to the people who need it. And that means a device should not cost
more just because a person is blind or has low vision. Part of the solution
is using "off-the-shelf" products and tools and building accessibility into
things. But it's also a vast pool of computer code that is created and shared
publicly on the web for free. There are a bunch of small groups using this
code to adapt existing tools or create new ones for accessibility, like
open-source screen readers, braille note-takers, and text-to-speech
applications. Very often, these are vital but underfunded efforts kept alive
by volunteers. 

 

"In the same way that governments support essential industries because they
can't afford to have those industries fail sometimes, I think we need to
support accessibility and open source, because it's critical," Miele said.
He's been thinking a lot about that problem, and how he could use his
MacArthur grant to start a foundation that could help sustain existing work
and fund new projects.

 

In fiction, there are the blind sages and seers, the Marvel-ized blind
superheroes, and the innumerable figures of speech that frame blindness as
the absence of light, information, and knowledge. And in real life, there are
"precious few blind people" who are known for their contributions to the
world, Miele said.

 

Last fall, Miele made his way north of Berkeley, around the curve of Wildcat
Canyon, to Rolling Hills Memorial Park in Richmond, Calif. There, he visited
the grave of tenBroek, the blind Berkeley law professor, who died in 1968. It
all became very clear. He wants to teach people about blind leaders like
tenBroek. 

 

"I'd like there to be more blind people who are known for doing good in the
world," Miele said. 

And hopefully, by embroidering the names of blind "badasses" onto the
patchwork quilt of history, the fear can subside. 

"People are really terrified of disability, and especially blindness," Miele
said. "There's research that shows that a significant number of people would
rather be dead than blind. And I'm here to tell you, it's definitely better
to be blind than dead. I'm having a pretty good time."

Life with a disability is much richer, more complex than the myths we are
sold. It's a tale of networks and inventiveness, and of the devastatingly
ordinary yearning to be witnessed in our entirety. Not as superhuman or
subhuman; just as human. 

 

Witness rebirth

The Cave no longer exists. The dynamic, communitarian version shut down in
2009, part of an effort by Berkeley to formalize the center and comply with
federal regulations. The library basement is now a design studio, and the
Disabled Students' Program, with its own building at the heart of Berkeley's
campus, helps with educational accommodations. 

 

Greco, the Cave supervisor from 2005 until it closed, still feels conflicted
about her role in ushering in the end. "I kind of felt like I was being made
into the police officer. I was The Man all of a sudden," she said. "I knew
the stories of how important this place was to all of them, and I had to
change it. I inevitably shut the door on it for the last time."

 

The basement's lockers, full of decades-overdue audiobook vinyls from the
Library of Congress, dusty books, and long-forgotten knick-knacks, were
cleaned out. The Thermoform, which printed braille and grilled cheeses, was
going to be trashed - near-sacrilege to Greco - so she found a new home for
the machine with a Cave alum, who then gave it to Miele. The Chinese
restaurant where the Cave community would gather to celebrate graduations has
been replaced by new development. There are curb cuts and talking crosswalks
at most intersections downtown. 

 

But some things are the same. The collegiate spirit of unrest still manifests
as bullhorn protests, about anything from far-flung conflicts to local
issues, during lunchtime on the campus's central drag. 

 

In 2017, students organized to demand a new kind of center for those with
disabilities, a place where they could enjoy the full social lives that
define college years. In a tense back-and-forth lasting years, student
activists lobbied the university for funding, and for a space. They were
offered room in another basement. This time, they said no.

 

In 2020, Berkeley finally agreed to establish a Disability Cultural Center in
a ground-level suite within a cluster of corrugated metal portable buildings.


The center will be a service and social hub for students with all kinds of
disabilities, including people with chronic health conditions, psychological
disorders, and learning disabilities, wheelchair users and those with sensory
problems, as well as those who are not "out" about their disabilities, said
Ann Kwong, the center's coordinator. It will also serve blind students.

 

The intention is to create a space "for people to feel comfortable, safe
enough, and [the] vulnerability to experience their own change and shift in
disability," she said.

 

It will be, in essence, a Cave - even if not The Cave - for a new generation.