Artificial Intelligence, History, and Blindness: Lessons and Musings

The clearest account of what artificial intelligence (AI) means for Blind People comes from Blind People themselves, and history shows why those voices deserve to be heard first: again and again, Blind People have created the very tools the rest of the world later embraced. In early nineteenth century Italy, the inventor Pellegrino Turri designed an early typewriter for Countess Carolina Fantoni, a Blind friend who wanted to write her own letters rather than rely on a scribe, and the device that grew out of that friendship eventually transformed offices everywhere. In 1824, a teenager in Paris who was Blind devised the raised dot system that finally gave Blind People a real path to reading and writing on their own, and Blind People were the first anywhere to render printed characters as patterns of dots, an idea that later made dot matrix printers and the display screens in everyday devices possible. Organizations serving Blind readers were pressing full length books onto durable vinyl discs as early as 1934, roughly fourteen years before that record format reached commercial music shops in 1948. And the first reading machine that could turn print into speech, unveiled in 1976, brought together optical text recognition, synthesized speech, and the flatbed scanner after a Blind man he did not know, seated near him on a flight, explained that what truly blocked him was reaching everyday printed material. Broadcaster and access technology advocate Jonathan Mosen, who is both Blind and hard of hearing, argues that Blind People are reaping the gains of AI more fully than sighted people are, the latest turn in a long history of Blind People inventing tools and adopting them well before others recognize their value.

For decades, the visual details that sighted people take in without thinking stayed out of reach for Blind People, and AI is now closing much of that gap. Mosen recounts how the photographs from his 2015 wedding to his wife Bonnie, who is also Blind, sat unopened on a drive at home because the couple had no way to enjoy them, yet a decade later, at their vow renewal in Las Vegas, AI tools let the two of them sit together going through every picture, asking questions about each one and sharing the memories the way other couples do. In ordinary life he turns to AI to read his mail, take in the view from a hotel window while traveling, identify packages, and work out the buttons on a remote control he has never handled. Newer smart glasses that look completely unremarkable now hold a small camera, microphone, and speakers that sit just outside the ear, letting a Blind person keep both hands free for a cane and groceries while asking what is arranged on a shelf or reading aloud a sign stuck to a doorway. For People who are hard of hearing, the same change is arriving: hearing aids running machine learning now pull a chosen voice out of the surrounding noise with far more skill than the rigid systems of a few years ago managed, and the live captions built into iOS 26 let someone follow a meeting that provides no access technology for hearing, where before there was only guesswork.

A genuine shift in power is underway as Blind People begin writing their own software with AI, a practice some call vibe coding. Mosen suggests Blind People are especially good at it, because they grasp how interfaces actually work, they have become skilled troubleshooters out of necessity, and they know intimately the tools they rely on every day, so they can spell out exactly what would serve them and then build, test, and refine it themselves instead of waiting in a line that rarely moves. He celebrates a flourishing of new software in which Blind People are creating solutions for Blind People and closing the accessibility gaps they spent years asking others to fix. Yet he describes capable, decent people being swarmed by an online mob for the sole reason that the software improving Blind lives was made partly with AI, and he calls this bullying unacceptable, insists it must stop, and says everyone shares a duty to hold the bullies to account. The worries about AI written code are not imaginary, he grants: one large review found only just over half of such code free of known security flaws, and a separate study found people leaning on AI assistants produced weaker code while wrongly trusting it was safe. Blind People know that pain from long experience, because human developers have for years let problems that affect only Blind users sit unfixed, judging that the smallest slice of the user base could wait.

The deepest danger Mosen names is that AI will simply soak up the low expectations the world has long held about Blind People and hand them back as fact, since an AI built on data drawn from a world that has always underrated Blind People will keep underrating them unless we refuse to let it. He points to the work of the National Federation of the Blind, where Blind People are pushing to build data that tells the truth, that blindness is no barrier to a full life when proper training and genuine opportunity exist, and that such data should shape hiring and public policy rather than entrench old prejudice. For this to happen, Blind users themselves must help train these systems and define what good accessibility looks like, not arrive once every important choice has already been made for them. That obligation falls to everyone willing to stand with Blind People against the forces that push them aside: inclusion and access are not gifts handed down as charity at a convenient moment, but responsibilities each of us carries personally and together, lived out through every decision made in real consultation with Blind People. Community Builders who take that to heart will refuse to let a new circle of gatekeepers decide the future of Blind People from the outside, and will instead advocate for the training of these systems and in the rooms where they are governed, to let Blind People speak for themselves.

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By: Jonathan Mosen