Aaron Preece
If you're a longtime reader of AccessWorld, you may recognize the name Joshua A. Miele. In the late 2000s, we published articles on his work at the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute. More recently, in 2021, we interviewed him when he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship. Now, with the release of his memoir, Connecting Dots: A Blind Life, I wanted to take some time to reflect on the book and explain why I personally would highly recommend it.
When the book was first released, we interviewed Miele on the AccessWorld podcast, where he discussed his life, work, and memoir. This article offers a more personal reflection on the book and the value it offers to readers of all backgrounds.
The book covers Dr. Miele’s life from the moment he became blind due to an acid attack at age four, all the way to his receipt of the MacArthur Fellowship in 2021. It details his early life in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn and his later years in Rockland County. It follows his journey through the University of California, Berkeley; his contributions as one of the great pioneers of assistive technology through his work with Berkeley Systems; and his careers at NASA, the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, and, more recently, Amazon. Throughout the memoir, we witness the people and forces that shaped Dr. Miele’s path and how he came to define his career and identity.
Being part of the blindness field, one of our key goals—personally and professionally—is to promote the success of people who are blind or have low vision, not just in work, but in life overall. As part of that mission, we’re always seeking to understand what helps people succeed. I’ve long believed that one of the biggest factors in the success of blind individuals is the support and belief of family and authority figures, as well as acceptance by their peers during childhood. That belief is clearly validated in this memoir.
We see how Dr. Miele was expected by those around him to thrive and succeed. Their willingness to answer his questions about the world was key. This is especially evident with his stepfather Klaus, a geologist who worked at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. Klaus and his colleagues were willing to demonstrate their work and explain the technology they used, which seems to have played a critical role in shaping young Joshua’s long-term interests. The belief his family and mentors had in him likely contributed to the confidence that later led him to study physics, attend Berkeley, and eventually work for NASA.
As a blind person myself, I find it fascinating to learn about the lives of others who share similar experiences. Of course, you can learn about people gradually through interactions, but there’s something uniquely powerful about a highly detailed memoir that spans the full arc of someone’s life. It provides a fuller picture of how someone blind exists in the world. The similarities and differences to your own experiences can both be illuminating.
Part of what made reading Connecting Dots so engaging for me was the ability to compare my own life and upbringing to Dr. Miele’s—how our educations aligned or differed, the kinds of technology we used, and how we experienced the world. There may not be a concrete conclusion to draw from such comparisons, but they provide an enriching reflection. It’s common to hear about the importance of representation, and I don’t think I fully grasped how much it could matter until reading this memoir. It adds a valuable layer to the reading experience that’s hard to describe until you feel it for yourself.
I was also fascinated by the discussion of the technology Miele used while growing up in the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s—from tools like the VersaBraille and early Apple computers to the development of one of the first screen readers for a graphical operating system, OutSpoken, during his time at Berkeley Systems. It’s striking to see how accessible computing was in the pre-GUI era, how things regressed temporarily, and then became accessible again through tools like OutSpoken and later JAWS. The sophistication of the technology available even then—like what was housed in "The Cave," a resource room for blind students at Berkeley—was far beyond what I had realized.
Overall, the book is incredibly well written. The prose is excellent and evocative. I appreciated Miele’s frank discussion of topics that could easily have been glossed over—such as his experiences with drugs during his high school years. As mentioned earlier, I would recommend this book to anyone, whether you are blind or low vision yourself, a friend or family member of someone who is, a professional in the blindness field, or simply a member of the general public. There is so much to be appreciated in this memoir.
Connecting Dots: A Blind Life can be obtained in eBook format from Bookshare or your retailer of choice—Amazon, Barnes & Noble—in audio format from the National Library Service or Audible, and in print from your retailer of choice. To learn more about Dr. Miele, check out our podcast, see our Employment Matters from 2021, or our series on the work of the Smith-Kettlewell Institute, parts I, II, III, and IV.
