Joshua Miele

Joshua Miele, a 2021 MacArthur “genius grant” fellow and inventor of adaptive technologies, became blind when he was a child. His lived experience as a disabled person has given him a unique and creative approach in his decades of work designing new accessibility tools, ranging from Amazon Alexa features that make the voice assistant more useful and enjoyable for customers with disabilities to tactile maps that allow people to navigate through streets via Braille and raised lines. Miele has also criticized the health care industry for its failures to consider how services can be made more accessible. “Health care and health tech are really lacking in their thinking about disability inclusion,” Miele said at a STAT Summit in 2022. “I think of the medical system as one of the most ableist institutions we still have.”