This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Not long ago virtual assistants and VR gaming were the makings of science fiction. But today, as we see developers across the board incorporating these technologies into apps and other tech, including for people who are blind or have low vision, these breakthroughs aren’t just possible, they’re part of the fabric of everyday life. In this episode Dr. Cal talks with Steve Ewell, Executive Director...
Apr 04, 2025•32 min•Season 5Ep. 6
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Technology developed specifically for people with low vision has historically been bespoke, specific, and expensive, requiring the creation of new technology for a relatively small population of users. But recently we’re seeing a paradigm shift from building new vision tech from scratch to building on top of existing technology that most people use daily. In this episode, Dr. Cal talks with Karth...
Feb 18, 2025•29 min•Season 5Ep. 5
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Today, self-driving cars are all the buzz when it comes to cutting edge driving technology that could help people with vision impairmentdrive. But there are other, simpler technologies that are already helping people who are blind or visually impaired navigate behind the wheel - some of which draw on technology that’s been around for hundreds of years! In this episode, Dr. Cal talks with Dr. Henr...
Jan 07, 2025•26 min•Season 5Ep. 4
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. When it comes to navigation technology for people who are blind or visually impaired, many apps utilize voice commands, loud tones or beeps, or haptic feedback. In an effort to create a more natural, seamless experience, the team at BenVision has created a different type of system that allows users to navigate using musical cues instead! For this episode, Dr. Cal spoke with BenVision’s CEO and co...
Sep 17, 2024•32 min•Season 5Ep. 3
We appreciate your support for our show — and now, we need your help nominating the On Tech & Vision podcast for the People’s Choice Podcast Awards! We are participating in these awards so we can showcase On Tech & Vision to a broader audience, gain recognition within the industry, and, most importantly, help spread the message about Lighthouse Guild and the role that technology is playing in tearing down barriers for people who are blind or visually impaired. To help us nominate On Tech...
Jul 12, 2024•1 min
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. For hundreds of years, health professionals have dreamed of restoring vision for people who are blind or visually impaired. However, doing so, either through transplanting a functioning eye or using technological aids, is an incredibly complex challenge. In fact, many considered it impossible. But thanks to cutting-edge research and programs, the ability to restore vision is getting closer than e...
Jul 12, 2024•44 min•Season 5Ep. 2
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. This episode is about how biosensor technology is revolutionizing the field of diagnostic and preventive medicine. Biosensors can take many forms — wearable, implantable, and even ingestible. And they can serve many different functions as well, most notably when it comes to detecting the various pressure levels in our bodies. This episode features interviews with several luminaries working with b...
Apr 26, 2024•32 min•Season 5Ep. 1
When it comes to emerging technology, there’s no hotter topic than artificial intelligence. Programs like ChatGPT and Midjourney are becoming more popular and are inspiring people to explore the possibilities of what AI can achieve — including when it comes to accessible technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. One of those people is Saqib Shaikh, an engineering manager at Microsoft. Saqib leads the team that developed an app called Seeing AI, which utilizes the latest generatio...
Feb 16, 2024•27 min•Season 4Ep. 6
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. When it comes to art, a common phrase is “look, don’t touch.” Many think of art as a purely visual medium, and that can make it difficult for people who are blind or visually impaired to engage with it. But in recent years, people have begun to reimagine what it means to experience and express art. For this episode, Dr. Cal spoke to El-Deane Naude from Sony Electronics. El-Deane discussed the Ret...
Dec 08, 2023•37 min•Season 4Ep. 5
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. When we buy a product off the shelf, we rarely think about how much work went into getting it there. Between initial conception and going to market, life-changing technology requires a rigorous testing and development process. That is especially true when it comes to accessible technology for people who are blind or visually impaired. For this episode, Dr. Cal spoke to Jay Cormier, the President ...
Oct 10, 2023•38 min•Season 4Ep. 4
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. The white cane and guide dogs are long-established foundational tools used by people with vision impairment to navigate. Although it would be difficult to replace the 35,000 years of bonding between humans and dogs, researchers are working on robotic technologies that can replicate many of the same functions of a guide dog. One such project, called LYSA, is being developed by Vix Labs in Brazil. ...
Jul 28, 2023•33 min•Season 4Ep. 3
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Navigating the world can be difficult for anyone, whether or not they have vision loss. Tasks like driving safely through a city, navigating a busy airport, or finding the right bus stop all provide unique challenges. Thankfully, advances in technology are giving people more freedom of movement than ever before, allowing them to get where they want, when they want, safely. Smart Cities are puttin...
Jun 02, 2023•39 min•Season 4Ep. 2
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. For decades, people with vision loss had limited options when it came to accessing video games. Aside from screen magnification and text-to-voice tools, gamers who are blind or visually impaired didn’t have many ways to play their favorite titles. But in recent years, the same cutting-edge technology used to create games has been used to also make them more accessible for people with vision impai...
Apr 14, 2023•31 min•Season 4Ep. 1
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Marcus Roberts, Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, and even Louis Braille (who invented the Braille Music Notation system still used today) prove that musicians who are blind or visually impaired have made profound impacts on our musical landscape. However, to get their work to us, musicians who are blind have had to structure complex workarounds, like relying on sighted musicians to demonstrate complex...
Mar 06, 2023•35 min•Season 3Ep. 6
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Lots of people have voice-controlled smart home assistants like Siri, Google, or Alexa in their homes…. to listen to the news or to set timers. But they can do so much more! David Frerichs, Principal Engineer, Alexa Experience at Amazon on the aging and accessibility team, shares his design philosophy for making voice assistants more inclusive, and the preferred mode of engagement for every user....
Jan 24, 2023•35 min•Season 3Ep. 5
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Artifacts from Blackbeard’s sunken pirate ship are on display in the North Carolina Maritime Museum in Beaufort, North Carolina. But now they are also accessible to visitors who are blind, thanks to the efforts of Peter Crumley, who spearheads the Beaufort Blind Project. In this episode, we ask: How can new technology help make sites like these as accessible to people who are blind as they are to...
Nov 11, 2022•39 min•Season 3Ep. 4
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. In 1997, Gary Kasparov lost an epic chess rematch to IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue, but since then, artificial intelligence has become humanity’s life-saving collaborator. This episode explores how AI will revolutionize vision technology and, beyond that, all of medicine. Karthik Kannan, co-founder of AI vision-tech company Envision, explains the difference between natural intelligence and artifi...
Oct 07, 2022•36 min•Season 3Ep. 3
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Innovations in implant technology are advancing at lightning speed, profoundly impacting the lives of people who are blind or visually impaired. In On Tech And Vision, we’ve profiled some amazing new implant technologies that have the potential to restore people’s sight. But in this episode, we pump the breaks — because we need to address a critical part of the innovation process: the ethical fra...
Aug 12, 2022•31 min•Season 3Ep. 2
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. People who are blind or visually impaired know all too well the challenges of living in a sighted world. But today, the capabilities of computer vision and other tech are converging with the needs of people who are blind and low-vision and may help level the playing field for young people with all different sensory abilities. These tools can pave the way for children’s active participation and co...
Jun 03, 2022•32 min•Season 3Ep. 1
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. In 2012, Christine Ha won the third season of Masterchef, after having lost her vision in her twenties. Since her win, she has opened two restaurants in Houston, adapting to the challenges the pandemic still poses to restaurateurs in order to meet the needs of her community. In a similarly innovative way, Max Ostermeier, CEO and Founder of Implandata Ophthalmic Products out of Hannover Germany, h...
Apr 15, 2022•36 min•Season 2Ep. 6
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. The Enigma machines that Germany used to encode messages during World War II were notorious for their complexity. Two Enigma experts — Dr. Tom Perera, a retired neuroscientist, and founder of EnigmaMuseum.com, and Dr. Mark Baldwin, an expert on the story of Enigma machines — tell us how the Allies were able to crack the code, by using input-output mapping. The human brain is similarly complex. Un...
Mar 04, 2022•31 min•Season 2Ep. 5
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Every day, people who are blind or visually impaired use their hearing to compensate for vision loss. But when we lose our vision, can we access our visual cortex via other senses? We call this ability for the brain to change its activity “plasticity,” and brain plasticity is an area of active research. In this episode, we’ll explore how, through sensory substitution, audio feedback can, in some ...
Jan 26, 2022•30 min•Season 2Ep. 4
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Today’s big idea is about exciting and emerging technologies that will someday allow people who are blind or visually impaired to navigate fully autonomously. In this episode, you will meet Jason Eichenholz, the Co-Founder and CTO of Luminar, and his manufacturing engineer, Nico Gentry. Luminar’s LIDAR technology is instrumental to the development of self-driving cars, but this same technology co...
Dec 10, 2021•25 min•Season 2Ep. 3
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Today’s big idea is Sonar and a somewhat similar technology called LiDAR! Can we use the latest sonar technology for obstacle detection the way bats and other nocturnal creatures do? There have been many exciting advances happening in sonar sensors that now make this possible for people who are blind. However, unlike bats, we won’t need to receive feedback signals through our ears. Advances in ha...
Oct 29, 2021•23 min•Season 2Ep. 2
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Close your eyes. Raise your hands. Reach out and touch the nearest surface. What are you touching? A desktop, a leather steering wheel cover, a porcelain cup, a plastic keyboard? Our sense of touch and the way in which we interpret the materials in our environment are fundamental to our experience of the world. This episode’s big idea is the new developments in tactile technologies. You’re probab...
Sep 17, 2021•26 min•Season 2Ep. 1
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Today’s big idea highlights how innovations don’t happen in a vacuum, but rather a long chain of science and research and developments that build on each other. Dr. Shelley Fried’s work exemplifies this process. It took him a career’s worth of experiments and adjustments to enable his cortical brain implants to bypass the eye and restore the patient’s ability to perceive light. He had a lot of ob...
Sep 08, 2021•30 min•Season 1Ep. 10
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. This episode’s big idea is navigation and how to implement a navigation solution that enables people with vision impairment to broadly travel cities — how and when they want to, independently. Dr. Roberts talks with Javier Pita, the creator of such a technology called NaviLens, which marries location finding with information. Dr. Roberts also talks with representatives of New York City’s Metropol...
Sep 08, 2021•25 min•Season 1Ep. 8
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Today’s big idea is: How will remote diagnostic tests change ophthalmology and vision care? It might be a foreign concept for some, but the specialists in today’s episode, Dr. Peter Pham and Dr. Sean Ianchulev, founders of (Keep Your Sight, a nonprofit focused on remote diagnostic vision tests) share how they can conduct more reliable perimetry tests that help detect macular degeneration, glaucom...
Sep 08, 2021•31 min•Season 1Ep. 9
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Today’s big idea centers on the place where big ideas get born — the human brain. In today’s episode, Dr. Roberts and his guests explore theories of brain plasticity, sensory substitution, and sensory augmentation. Dr. Patricia Grant discusses the BrainPort, which uses sensory substitution in this case, the nerve fibers in the tongue, to send information to the brain instead of the optic nerve. D...
Sep 08, 2021•24 min•Season 1Ep. 7
This podcast is about big ideas on how technology is making life better for people with vision loss. Today’s big idea is about using augmented reality, machine learning, and soon, fifth generation (5G) connectivity to improve vision. The Eyedaptic Eye2 is software-driven smart glasses for people with vision impairment. Dr. Roberts speaks with Dr. Mitul Mehta and Jay Cormier about how Eyedaptic uses machine learning to develop algorithms to guide augmentations that adapt to a person’s vision defi...
Jul 01, 2021•29 min•Season 1Ep. 6
