> As a blind person, AI has changed my life.

Something one doesn't see in news headlines. Happy to see this comment.

What other accessibility features do you wish existed in video AI models? Real-time vs post-processing?

Mainly realtime processing. I play video games, and would love to play something like Legend of Zelda and just have the AI going, then ask it "read the menu options as I move between them," and it would speak each menu option as the cursor moves to it. Or when navigating a 3D environment, ask it to describe the surroundings, then ask it to tell me how to get to a place or object, then it guide me to it. That could be useful in real-world scenarios too.

Weird question, but have you ever tried text adventures? It seems like it's inherently the ideal option, if you can get your screen reader going.

Yep, they're nice. There are even online versions.

+1 and I would be curious to read and learn more about it.

If you want to see more on this topic, check out (google) the podcast I co-host called Accessibility and Gen. AI.

Thanks for the recommendation, just downloaded a few episodes!;

Honestly, that’s such a great example of how to share what you do on the interwebs. Right timing, helpful and on topic. Since I’ve listened to several episodes of the podcast, I can confirm it definitely delivers.

A blind comedian / TV personality in the UK has just done a TV show on this subject - I haven't seen it, but here's a recent article about it: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/nov/23/chris-m...

Hilariously, he beat the other teams in the “Say What You See” round (yes, really) of last year’s Big fat Quiz. No AI involved.

https://youtu.be/i5NvNXz2TSE?t=4732

Haha that's great!

I'm not a fan of his (nothing against him, just not my cup of tea when it comes to comedy and mostly not been interested in other stuff he's done), but the few times I have seen him as a guest on shows it's been clear that he's a generally clever person.

I remembered he was once a techie, and Wikipedia confirms that he (Chris McCausland) has a BSc Honours in Software Engineering.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_McCausland

Chris McCausland is great. A fair bit of his material _does_ reference his visual impairment, but it's genuinely witty and sharp, and it never feels like he's leaning on it for laughs/relying on sympathy.

He did a great skit with Lee Mack at the BAFTAs 2022[0], riffing on the autocue the speakers use for announcing awards.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CLhy0Zq95HU

Same! @devinprater, have you written about your experiences? You have an eager audience...

I suppose I should write about them. A good few will be about issues with the mobile apps and websites for AI, like Claude not even letting me know a response is available to read, let alone sending it to the screen reader to be read. It's a mess, but if we blind people want it, we have to push through inaccessibility to get it.

> Something one doesn't see in news headlines.

I hope this wasn't a terrible pun

No pun intended but it's indeed an unfortunate choice of words on my part.

My blind friends have gotten used to it and hear/receive it not as a literal “see“ any more. They would not feel offended by your usage.

Nah, best pun ever!

Like many others, I too would very much like to hear about this.

I taught our entry-level calculus course a few years ago and had two blind students in the class. The technology available for supporting them was abysmal then -- the toolchain for typesetting math for screen readers was unreliable (and anyway very slow), for braille was non-existent, and translating figures into braille involved sending material out to a vendor and waiting weeks. I would love to hear how we may better support our students in subjects like math, chemistry, physics, etc, that depend so much on visualization.

For a physical view on this see:

https://www.reddit.com/r/openscad/comments/1p6iv5y/christmas...

The creator, https://www.reddit.com/user/Mrblindguardian/ has asked for help a few times in the past (I provided feedback when I could), but hasn't needed to as often of late, presumably due to using one or more LLMs.

I did a maths undergrad degree and the way my blind, mostly deaf friend and I communicated was using a stylized version of TeX markup. I typed on a terminal and he read / wrote on his braille terminal. It worked really well.

Thanks! Did you communicate in "raw" TeX, or was it compiled / encoded for braille? Can you point me at the software you used?

Yes, mostly raw TeX, just plain ascii - not specially coded for Braille. This was quite a long time ago, mid 1980's, so not long after TeX had started to spread in computer science and maths communities. My friend was using a "Versa Braille" terminal hooked via a serial port to a BBC Micro running a terminal program that I'd written. I cannot completely remember how we came to an understanding of the syntax to use. We did shorten some items because the Versa Braille only had 20 chars per "line".

He is still active and online and has a contact page see https://www.foneware.net. I have been a poor correspondent with him - he will not know my HN username. I will try to reach out to him.

Now that I've been recalling more memories of this, I do remember there being encoding or "escaped" character issues - particularly with brackets and parentheses.

There was another device between the BBC Micro and the "Versa Braille" unit. The interposing unit was a matrix switch that could multiplex between different serial devices - I now suspect it might also have been doing some character escaping / translation.

For those not familiar with Braille, it uses a 2x3 array (6 bits) to encode everything. The "standard" (ahem, by country) Braille encodings are super-sub-optimal for pretty much any programming language or mathematics.

After a bit of (me)memory refresh, in "standard" Braille you only get ( and ) - and they both encode to the same 2x3 pattern! So in Braille ()() and (()) would "read" as the same thing.

I now understand why you were asking about the software used. I do not recall how we completely worked this out. We had to have added some sort of convention for scoping.

I now also remember that the Braille terminal aggressively compressed whitespace. My friend liked to use (physical) touch to build a picture, but it was not easy to send spatial / line-by-line information to the Braille terminal.

Being able to rely on spatial information has always stuck with me. It is for this reason I've always had a bias against Python, it is one of the few languages that depends on precise whitespace for statement syntax / scope.

Thank you so much for all this detail. This is very interesting & quite helpful, and it's great you were able to communicate all this with your friend.

For anyone else interested: I wanted to be able to typeset mathematics (actual formulas) for the students that's as automated as possible. There are 1 or 2 commercial products that can typeset math in Braille (I can't remember the names but can look them up) but not priced for individual use. My university had a license to one of them but only for their own use (duh) and they did not have the staff to dedicate to my students (double duh).

My eventual solution was to compile latex to html, which the students could use with a screen reader. But screen readers were not fully reliable, and very, very slow to use (compared to Braille), making homework and exams take much longer than they need to. I also couldn't include figures this way. I looked around but did not find an easy open source solution for converting documents to Braille. It would be fantastic to be able to do this, formulas and figures included, but I would've been very happy with just the formulas. (This was single variable calculus; I shudder to think what teaching vector calc would have been like.)

FYI Our external vendor was able to convert figures to printed Braille, but I imagine that's a labor intensive process.

Partway through the term we found funding for dedicated "learning assistants" (an undergraduate student who came to class and helped explain what's going on, and also met with the students outside of class). This, as much or more than any tech, was probably the single most imapctful thing.

`Something one doesn't see` - no pun intended

I have to believe you used the word see twice ironically.

I must be wrong, but can’t help but harbor a mild suspicion that your use of sight metaphors is not coincidental.

Can you share some ways AI has changed your life?

I guess that auto-generated audio descriptions for (almost?) any video you want is a very, very nice feature for a blind person.

My two cents, this seems like a case where it’s better to wait for the person’s response instead of guessing.

My two cents, this seems like a comment it should be up to the OP to make instead of virtue signaling.

Yall could have gotten a serviceable answer about this topic out of ChatGPT. 2025 version of "let me google that for you"

> Can you share some ways AI has changed your life?

A question directed to GP, directly asking about their life and pointing this out is somehow virtue signalling, OK.

You can safely assume that anyone who uses “virtue signaling” unironically has nothing substantive to say.

>[People who call out performative bullshit should be ignored because they’re totally wrong and I totally mean it.]

Maybe you’re just being defensive? I’m sure he didn’t mean an attack at you personally.

It’s presumptuous of you to assume I was offended.

Accusing someone of “virtue signaling” is itself virtue signaling, just for a different in-group to use as a thought terminating cliche. It has been for decades. “Performative bullshit” is a great way to put it, just not in the way you intended.

If the OP had a substantive point to make they would have made it instead of using vague ad hominem that’s so 2008 it could be the opening track on a Best of Glenn Beck album (that’s roughly when I remember “virtue signaling” becoming a cliche).

Funny coming from someone who tells others not to speak unless asked, while no one asked them either.

From the list of virtues, which one was this signaling?

https://www.virtuesforlife.com/virtues-list/

I’d guess: Respect, consideration, authenticity, fairness.

Or should I too perhaps wait for OP to respond.

That list needs updating. Lots of things became virtuous in scenario. During Covid, fear was a virtue. You had to prove how scared you were of it, all the masks you wore because it made you “one of the good ones” to be fearful.

...you know, people can have opinions about the best way to behave outside of self-aggrandizement, even if your brain can't grasp this concept.

Fair enough. Anyway I wasn't trying to say what actually changed GP's life, I was just expressing my opinion on what video models could potentially bring as an improvement to a blind person.

>My two cents

Yikes...

I know some people will roll their eyes at this, but it's worth reflecting on how even small phrases like "my two cents" carry historical and cultural baggage. Language doesn't exist in a vacuum; it encodes assumptions about who gets to speak, whose perspectives are valued, and how we frame participation in public discourse.

The metaphor of assigning a literal monetary value to one's opinion reinforces the idea that contributions are transactional and that their "worth" is measured through an economic lens. That framing can be exclusionary, especially for people who have been historically marginalized by economic systems. It subtly normalizes a worldview where only those with enough "currency" - social, financial, or otherwise - deserve to be heard.

It's not about policing every idiom, but about being mindful of how our words might echo structures we're trying to move beyond. There are plenty of alternatives ("just my perspective" or "here's how I see it" etc.) that don't inherit that baggage. Language evolves, and we can choose to evolve it in more inclusive directions.

> The metaphor of assigning a literal monetary value to one's opinion reinforces the idea that contributions are transactional and that their "worth" is measured through an economic lens. That framing can be exclusionary, especially for people who have been historically marginalized by economic systems. It subtly normalizes a worldview where only those with enough "currency" - social, financial, or otherwise - deserve to be heard.

No. It’s acknowledging that that perhaps one’s opinion may not be as useful as somebody else’s in that moment. Which is often true!

Your first and third paragraphs are true, but they don’t apply to every bloody phrase.

people put too much weight onto words, the first lesson I learned on the internet is that words are harmless, might be deeply painful for some, but because people as my self put no weight behind them we don't even have a concept of keeping such things mindful since it never crosses our minds and it's really difficult to see if any other way even if we try to since it just seems like a bad joke.

And when I say 'it never crosses our minds' I really mean it, there's zero thoughts between thinking about a message and having it show up in a text box.

A really great example are slurs, for a lot of people they have to double take, but there's zero extra neurons fired when I read them. I guess early internet culture is to blame since all kinds of language was completely uncensored and it was very common to run into very hostile people/content.

The two cents are not literally monetary - your opinion is literally the two cents. You're contributing your understanding to the shared pot of understanding and that's represented by putting money into the pot, showing you have skin in the game. It's contributing to a larger body of knowledge by putting your small piece in - the phrases you suggest don't have that context behind them and in my opinion are worse for it. The beauty of the phrase is because the two cents are your opinion, everyone has enough, because everyone can have an opinion.

The lens through which you're analyzing the phrase is coloring how you see it negatively, and the one I'm using is doing the opposite. There is no need to change the phrase, just how it's viewed, I think.

guessing that being able to hear a description of what the camera is seeing (basically a special case of a video) in any circumstances is indeed life changing if you're blind...? take a picture through the window and ask what's the commotion? door closed outside that's normally open - take a picture, tell me if there's a sign on it? etc.

Not the gp, but currently reading a web novel with a card game where the author didn't include alt text in the card images. I contacted them about it and they started, but in the meantime ai was a big help. all kinds of other images on the internet as well when they are significant to understanding the surrounding text. better search experience when Google, DDG, and the like make finding answers difficult. I might use smart glasses for better outdoor orientation, though a good solution might take some time. phone camera plus ai is also situationally useful.

As a (web app) developer I never quite sure what to put in alt. Figured you might have some advice here?

The question to ask is, what a sighted person learns after looking at the image? The answer is the alt text. E.g if the image is a floppy, maybe you communicate that this is the save button. If it shows a cat sleeping on the windowsill, the alt text is yep: "my cat looking cute while sleeping on the windowsill".

I really like how you framed this as the takeaway or learning that needs to happen as what should be in the alt and not a recitation of the image. Where I've often had issues is more for things like business charts and illustrations and less cute cat photos.

It might be that you’re not perfectly clear on what exactly you’re trying to convey with the image and why it’s there.

sorry, snark does not help with my desire to improve accessibility in the wild.

I really didn’t mean to be snarky. Maybe if I was speaking, my tone would have made that more clear, or I could have worded it differently.

“Why is this here? What am I trying to say?” are super important things in design and also so easy to lose track of.

What would you put for this? "Graph of All-Transactions House Price Index for the United States 1975-2025"?

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/USSTHPI

Charts are one I've wondered about, do I need to try to describe the trend of the data, or provide several conclusions that a person seeing the chart might draw?

Just saying "It's a chart" doesn't feel like it'd be useful to someone who can't see the chart. But if the other text on the page talks about the chart, then maybe identifying it as the chart is enough?

What are you trying to point out with your graph in general? Write that basically. Usually graphs are added for some purpose, and assuming it's not purposefully misleading, verbalizing the purpose usually works well.

I might be an unusual case, but when I present graphs/charts it's not usually because I'm trying to point something out. It's usually a "here's some data, what conclusions do you draw from this?" and hopefully a discussion will follow. Example from recently: "Here is a recent survey of adults in the US and their religious identification, church attendance levels, self-reported "spirituality" level, etc. What do you think is happening?"

Would love to hear a good example of alt text for something like that where the data isn't necessarily clear and I also don't want to do any interpreting of the data lest I influence the person's opinion.

An image is the wrong way to convey something like that to a blind person. As written in one of my other comments, give the data in a table format or a custom widget that could be explored.

> and hopefully a discussion will follow.

Yeah, I think I misunderstood the context. I understood/assumed it to be for an article/post you're writing, where you have something you want to say in general/some point of what you're writing. But based on what you wrote now, it seems to be more about how to caption an image you're sending to a blind person in a conversation/discussion of some sort.

I guess at that point it'd be easier for them if you just share the data itself, rather than anything generated by the data, especially if there is nothing you want to point out.

It depends on the context. What do you want to say? How much of it is said in the text? Can the content of the image be inferred from the text part? Even in the best scenario though, giving a summary of the image in the alt text / caption could be immensely useful and include the reader in your thought process.

https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/ including how write alt text for charts.

a plaintext table with the actual data

Charts would have a link to tabular data. It’s the “business illustrations” that are more about understanding purpose.

"A meaningless image of a chart, from which nevertheless emanates a feeling of stonks going up"

The logic stays the same though the answer is longer and not always easy. Just saying "business chart" is totally useless. You can make a choice on what to focus and say "a chart of the stock for the last five years with constant improvement and a clear increase by 17 percent in 2022" (if it is a simple point that you are trying to make) or you can provide an html table with the datapoints if there is data that the user needs to explore on their own.

but the table exists outside the alt text, right? i don't know a mechanism to say "this html table represents the contents of this image" , in a way that screen readers and other accessibility technologies take advantage of

The figure tag has both image and caption tags that link them. As far as I remember, some content could be marked as screen reader only if you don't want for the table to be visible to the rest of the users.

Additionally, recently I've been a participant in accessibility studies where charts, diagrams and the like have been structured to be easier to explore with a sr. Those needed js to work and some of them looked custom, but they are also an alternative way to layer data.

Accessible info graphics [1]

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130922065731/http://www.last-c...

One way to frame it is: "how would I describe this image to somebody sat next to me?"

Important to add for blind people: "... assuming they never seen anything and visual metaphors won't work"

The amount of times I've seem captions that wouldn't make sense for people who never been able to see is staggering, I don't think most people realize how visual our typical language usage is.

I'm gonna flip this around... have you tried pasting the image (and the relevant paragraph of text) and asking ChatGPT (or another LLM) to generate the alt text for the image and see what it produces?

For example... https://chatgpt.com/share/692f1578-2bcc-8011-ac8f-a57f2ab6a7...

> I'm gonna flip this around... have you tried pasting the image (and the relevant paragraph of text) and asking ChatGPT (or another LLM) to generate the alt text for the image and see what it produces?

There's a great app by an indie developer that uses ML to identify objects in images. Totally scriptable via JavaScript, shell script and AppleScript. macOS only.

Could be 10, 100 or 1,000 images [1].

[1]: https://flyingmeat.com/retrobatch/

> As a (web app) developer I never quite sure what to put in alt.

Are you making these five mistakes when writing alt text? [1] Images tutorial [2] Alternative Text [3]

[1]: https://www.a11yproject.com/posts/are-you-making-these-five-...

[2]: https://www.w3.org/WAI/tutorials/images/

[3]: https://webaim.org/techniques/alttext/

Image descriptions. TalkBack on Android has it built in and uses Gemini. VoiceOver still uses some older, less accurate, and far less descriptive ML model, but we can share images to Seeing AI or Be My Eyes and such and get a description.

Video descriptions, through PiccyBot, have made watching more visual videos or videos where things happen that don't make sense without visuals much easier. Of course, it'd be much better if YouTube incorporated audio description through AI the same way they do captions, but that may happen in a good 2 years or so. I'm not holding my breath. Google as a whole is hard to get accessibility out of more than the bare minimum.

Looking up information like restaurant menus. Yes it can make things up, but worst-case, the waiter says they don't have that.

Finally good news about the AI doing something good for the people.

I’m not blind and AI has been great for me too.

Something else must be wrong with you then :)

The smiley at the end doesn’t hide how awful your comment is.

So serious... you should relax a bit and work up on your humor reception/understanding (smiley intentionally left out this time)

People need to understand that a lot of angst around AI comes from AI enabling people to do things that they formally needed to go through gatekeepers for. The angst is coming from the gatekeepers.

AI has been a boon for me and my non-tech job. I can pump out bespoke apps all day without having to get bent on $5000/yr/usr engineering software packages. I have a website for my side business that looks and functions professionally and was done with a $20 monthly AI subscription instead of a $2000 contractor.

I highly doubt "pumping out bespoke apps all day" is possible yet besides 100% boilerplate, and when possible then no good for any other purpose than enshittifiying the web, and at that point not profitable because everyone can do it.

I use AI daily as a senior coder for search and docs, and when used for prototyping you still need to be a senior coder to go from say 60% boilerplate to 100% finished app/site/whatever unless it's incredibly simple.

Often the problem with tech people is they think software only exists for tech or for being sold to others from tech.

Nothing I do is in the tech industry. It's all manufacturing and all the software is for in-house processes.

Believe it or not, software is useful to everyone and no longer needs to originate from someone who only knows software.

I'm saying you can't do what you're saying without knowing code at the moment.

You didn't give any examples of the valuable bespoke apps that you are creating by the hour.

I simply don't believe you, and the arrogant salesy tone doesn't help.

LLMs can pretty reliably write 5-7k LOC.

If your needs fit in a program that size, you are pretty much good to go.

It will not rewrite PCB_CAD 2025, but it will happily create a PCB hole alignment and conversion app, eliminated the need for the full PCB_CAD software if all you need is that one toolset from it.

Very, very, few pieces of software need to be full package enterprise productivity suites. If you just make photos black and white and resize them, you don't need Photoshop to do it. Or even ms paint. Any LLM will make a simple free program with no ads to do it. Average people generally do very simple dumb stuff with the expensive software they buy.

This is the same as the discussion about using Excel. Excel has its limitations, but it has enabled millions of people to do pretty sophisticated stuff without the help of “professionals”. Most of the stuff us tech people do is also basically some repetitive boilerplate. We just like to make things more complex than they need to be. I am always a little baffled why seemingly every little CRUD site that has at most 100 users needs to be run on Kubernetes with several microservices, CI/CD pipelines, and whatever.

As far as enshittification goes, this was happening long before AI. It probably started with SEO and just kept going from there.

The reality is too, that even if "what is acceptable" has not yet caught up to that guy working at Atlassian, polishing off a new field in Jira, people are using AI + Excel to manage their tasks EXACTLY the way their head works, not the way Jira works.

Yet we fail to see AI as a good thing but just as a jobs destroyer. Are we "better than" the people that used to fill toothpaste tubes manually until a machine was invented to replace them? They were just as mad when they got the pink slip.

I have told people that us techies have proudly killed the jobs of millions of people and we were arrogant about it. Now we are mad that it's our turn. Feels almost like justice :-)

> I use AI daily as a senior coder for search and docs, and when used for prototyping you still need to be a senior coder to go from say 60% boilerplate to 100% finished app/site/whatever unless it's incredibly simple.

I know you would like to believe that, but with the tools available NOW, that's not necessarily the case. For example, by using the Playwright or Chrome DevTools MCPs, models can see the web app are it's being created and it's pretty easy to prompt them to fix something they can see.

These models know the current frameworks and coding practices but they do need some guidance; they're not mindreaders.

I still don't believe that. Again yes a boilerplate calculator or recipe app probably, but anything advanced real world with latency issues, scaling, race conditions, css quirks, design weirdness, optimisation - in other words the things that actually require domain knowledge i still don't get much help with, even with Claude Code, pointers yes but they completely fumble actual production code in real world scenarios.

Again it's the last 5% that takes 95% of the time, and those 5% i haven't seen fixed with Claude or Gemini, because it's essentially quirks, browser errors, race conditions, visual alignment, etc etc. All stuff that completely goes way above any LLM's head atm from what i've seen.

They can definitely bullshit a 95% working app though, but that's 95% from being done ;)

AI is divine retribution for artists being really annoying on Twitter.

One cool feature they added for deaf parents a few years ago was a notification when it detects a baby crying.

Is that something you actually need AI for though? A device with a sound sensor and something that shines/vibrate a remote device when it detects sound above some threshold would be cheaper, faster detection, more reliable, easier to maintain, and more.

But your solution costs money in addition to the phone they already own for other purposes. And multiple things can make loud noises in your environment besides babies; differentiating between a police siren going by outside and your baby crying is useful, especially if the baby slept through the siren.

The same arguments were said for blind people and the multitude of one-off devices that smartphones replaced, OCR to TTS, color detection, object detection in photos/camera feeds, detecting what denomination US bills are, analyzing what's on screen semantically vs what was provided as accessible text (if any was at all), etc. Sure, services for the blind would come by and help arrange outfits for people, and audiobook narrators or braille translator services existed, and standalone devices to detect money denominations were sold, but a phone can just do all of that now for much cheaper.

All of these accessibility AI/ML features run on-device, so the knee-jerk anti-AI crowd's chief complaints are mostly baseless anyways. And for the blind and the deaf, carrying all the potential extra devices with you everywhere is burdensome. The smartphone is a minimal and common social and physical burden.

You are talking about a device of smart phone complexity. You need enough compute power to run a model that can distinguish noises. You need a TCP/IP stack and a wireless radio to communicate the information. At that point you have a smart phone. A simple sound threshold device would have too many false positives/negatives to be useful.

>Is that something you actually need AI for though?

Need? Probably not. I bet it helps though (false positives, etc.)

>would be cheaper, faster detection, more reliable, easier to maintain, and more.

Cheaper than the phone I already own? Easier to maintain than the phone that I don't need to do maintenance on?

From a fun hacking perspective, a different sensor & device is cool. But I don't think it's any of the things you mentioned for the majority of people.

> more reliable

I've worked on some audio/video alert systems. Basic threshold detectors produce a lot of false positives. It's common for parents to put white noise machines in the room to help the baby sleep. When you have a noise generating machine in the same room, you need more sophisticated detection.

False positives are the fastest way to frustrate users.

I also got notification on my apple watch, while being away from the house, that the homepod mini heard our fire alarm going off.

A call home let us know that our son had set it off learning to reverse-sear his steak.

If the fire alarm didn't go off, you didn't sear hard enough. :)

I live across the street from a fire station. Thank for you for diligence, little HomePod Mini, but I'm turning your notifications off now.

My wife is deaf, and we had one kid in 2023 and twins in 2025. There's been a noticeable improvement baby cry detection! In 2023, the best we could find was a specialized device that cost over $1,000 and has all sorts of flakiness/issues. Today, the built-in detection on her (android) phone + watch is better than that device, and a lot more convenient.

I wonder if there's anything that can help blind people to navigate the world more easily - I guess in the future AR Glasses won't just be for the sighted but allow people without vision to be helped considerably. It really is both amazing and terrifying the future we're heading towards.

From a couple years ago...

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/garage/wall-of-fame/seeing-a...

https://youtu.be/R2mC-NUAmMk

https://youtu.be/DybczED-GKE

... and that was 10 years ago. I'm curious for what it could do now.

AURA Vision for blind and low vision people has been doing this for years. Be My Eyes has been doing this for years without AI. Meta Ray-Bans can do this. There's nothing new coming soon that hasn't already been available for a while, only refinements.

This is an area where a difference in degree becomes a difference in kind quite easily. If an AI is telling you what it's looking at, it suddenly means a lot more once it… knows what it's looking at.

> As a blind person, AI has changed my life.

I know this is a low quality comment, but I'm genuinely happy for you.

I'm only commenting because I absolutely love this thread. It's an insight into something I think most of us are quite (I'm going to say it...) blind to in our normal experiences with daily life, and I find immense value in removing my ignorance about such things.

Hi Devin and other folks, I'm looking for software developers who are blind or hard of sight as there is a tool I'm building that I think might be of interest to them (it's free and open source). If you or anyone you know is interested in trying it please get in touch through my email.

I'm in the middle of updating a new public transit app my team wrote in Flutter and want it to flow better for blind people. Would you rather use AI chat session with realtime information or go through the screens with VoiceOver/TalkBack controls? What about trust and hallucinations?

Any tips you can give?