[NFBMT] Where The Bats Hung Out

[d m gina]

I thought it would never end.
Thanks for sharing.
Dar
Original message:
> 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.

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