22 Facts About Joshua Miele

Joshua A Miele was born on 1969 and is an American research scientist who specializes in accessible technology design.

Since 2019, Miele has been Principal Accessibility Researcher at Amazon Lab126, a subsidiary of Amazon that works on hardware products.

Joshua A Miele was born in New York in 1969, the son of Isabella and Jean Miele and one of three siblings.

Joshua Miele attended the Industrial Home for the Blind for kindergarten.

Joshua 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.

When Joshua Miele was six or seven years old, he would play with floor plans and layout tape in his father's office.

Joshua Miele observed that, in this new environment, "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".

Joshua 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, Joshua Miele debated whether he should start a company or pursue a PhD in policymaking.

Joshua 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.

Joshua Miele acted as a principal investigator on some of the organization's projects and was associate director of research and development from 2007 to 2019.

From 2011 to 2015, Joshua Miele served as president of the board of the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired, a nonprofit organization based in San Francisco.

Joshua Miele left Smith-Kettlewell at the beginning of 2019, after working for the organization for more than fifteen years, and joined Amazon Lab126 as Principal Accessibility Researcher.

In 2021, Joshua 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.

Joshua Miele explained at a 2022 conference that the prize would be used to found a nonprofit organization, named the Center for Accessibility and Open Source, that would fund open-source projects for people with disabilities.

Joshua Miele's older sister, Julia Miele Rodas, is a writer and professor at Bronx Community College, and his brother Jean Miele is a photographer.

Joshua Miele plays the bass for services at a Jewish spiritual community in Berkeley.

In 2003, while working at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, Joshua Miele began developing the Tactile Map Automated Production Project, a web application capable of producing tactile maps of streets suitable for printing with a braille embosser.

Joshua Miele later worked with the LightHouse for the Blind and Visually Impaired to create tactile maps of the Bay Area Rapid Transit.

In developing a concept, Joshua Miele adapted a Livescribe digital pen to read off relevant information when the user taps a certain part of a tactile map, like which buses come through each bus stop.

That year, Joshua Miele began hosting the annual Describeathon, a one-day event held at Smith-Kettlewell during which people recorded audio descriptions.

Joshua Miele developed a basic iPhone application for blind wayfinding named overTHERE and in 2015 founded the Blind Arduino Project, a local group of blind students and hobbyists involved with the maker movement focused on designing their own technological devices.