Blind Creators
Introduction
This directory brings together people who are blind or have low vision and who create in one or more of three ways: authoring books, developing apps, or making presentations. It consolidates three companion directories — Blind Authors, Blind Developers, and Blind Presenters — into a single alphabetical listing. Two related directories list works rather than people, with no limit per person: Blind Apps and Blind Books. It is meant as a resource for aspiring blind creators and as a way to find and reach the people listed.
Creators are listed alphabetically by last name as second-level headings, each giving the person’s full name. Under each name is a bulleted “Profiles:” list, in alphabetical order by label, linking to whatever pages are available, such as a personal website, Amazon, GitHub, Goodreads, LinkedIn, or Wikipedia. Then come up to three subsections — Apps, Books, and Presentations — and a subsection appears only when that person has work in it. Each subsection lists up to three works, most significant or most recent first, with a link to where the work can be reached and a one-line description.
A person qualifies in a category on these terms:
- Books. The creator was blind or had low vision when the book was written; is the sole author; the book was first published in 2000 or later; and it is available today in a digital format — electronic text or audio — through a working link.
- Apps. The creator is blind or has low vision; created or led the development of the app or tool; the app is reachable today through a working link to where it can be obtained and used; and it has been actively developed or maintained in 2020 or later.
- Presentations. The creator is blind or has low vision; the work is contemporary, from 2010 onward; it shows sustained, notable leadership rather than a one-off clip — such as a keynote at a recognized event, an established regularly published series, a body of at least three published works, or professional standing like a broadcasting role; and the creator holds the role in their own right.
The directory holds 125 people in all. Of these, 60 appear as book authors, 39 as app developers, and 42 as presenters. Those figures add up to more than 125 because 14 people work in more than one category — for example, an author who also speaks, or a developer who also writes — and each of them is counted once here, with every category that applies shown under their single entry. Twelve of them work in two categories, and two, Tony Gebhard and Brian Hartgen, work in all three.
The directory is English-language in scope: it relies on books, code, talks, and sources that can be read, run, or followed in English. Blind creators who publish or present in other languages are not represented here.
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Tony Acosta
- Kirk Adams
- Nicholas Adams
- Peter Altschul
- Taylor Arndt
- Jeff Bishop
- Amy Bovaird
- John Boyer
- Laura Bratton
- Tristen Breitenfeldt
- Shelly Brisbin
- Molly Burke
- Matt Campbell
- Anthony R. Candela
- Kim Charlson
- Ann Chiappetta
- Peggy Chong
- Belo Cipriani
- Naomi Cohn
- Anthony Corona
- Michael “Mick” Curran
- Dash
- Scott Davert
- Wendy S. David
- Judy Dixon
- Michael Doise
- Thomas “AnonyMouse” Domville
- Anna Dresner
- Tommy “The Blind Film Critic” Edison
- Lucy Edwards
- Paul Edwards
- Liam Erven
- David L. Faucheux
- Michael Feir
- Chancey Fleet
- Kelly Ford
- Chad E. Foster
- Bryan Garaventa
- Tony Gebhard
- Quin Gillespie
- Haben Girma
- M. Leona Godin
- David Goldfield
- Sherry Gomes
- Glen Gordon
- Jeremy Grandstaff
- Lucy Greco
- Sanford D. Greenberg
- John B. Grimes
- Christine Ha
- Alex Hall
- Brian Hartgen
- Mary Hiland
- Donna W. Hill
- James Tate Hill
- Michael Hingson
- Meriç Karaca
- Deborah Kendrick
- Deborah Kent
- George Kerscher
- Reuben Kigame
- Robert Kingett
- David Kingsbury
- Daniel Kish
- Georgina Kleege
- Ryan Knighton
- Stephen Kuusisto
- Bobbi LaChance
- Pete Lane
- Doug Lee
- Joseph Lee
- Andrew Leland
- Andre “Onj” Louis
- Stephen Lovely
- Tony Malykh
- Dean Martineau
- Jamal Mazrui
- J.J. Meddaugh
- Steven B. Mendelsohn
- Tyler Merren
- Joshua A. Miele
- Selina Mills
- Mark Morad
- Jalil Mortazavi
- Jonathan Mosen
- Marc Mulcahy
- Dave Nason
- Chris Nova
- Kim Nova
- Gary O’Donoghue
- James H. Omvig
- Ann K. Parsons
- Ken Perry
- Chris Peterson
- J. Pinto
- André Polykanine
- Shaun Preece
- Mika Pyyhkala
- T. V. Raman
- Mark Riccobono
- Derek Riemer
- Maud Rowell
- Lisa Salinger
- Fredric K. Schroeder
- Steven Scott
- Sam Seavey
- Saqib Shaikh
- Tyler Spivey
- Adrian Spratt
- Maribel Steel
- Penn Street
- Red Szell
- David S. Tatel
- Abbie Johnson Taylor
- James “Jamie” Teh
- Carter Temm
- Jeff Thompson
- Christopher “Q” Toth
- Sam Tupy
- Larry Turnbull (d. 2020)
- Erik Weihenmayer
- Peter White
- Quinton Williams
- Kristen Witucki
- David Woodbridge
- Conclusion
Tony Acosta
A creator in the Canary Islands, Spain, who teaches blind iPhone users through hundreds of Canal TifloAcosta videos and podcast episodes.
Profiles:
Apps
- TifloAcosta App — A free web app in Spanish and English, installable on iPhone, Android, and Windows with no registration, that gathers a growing library of guides, courses, news, and his video catalog, with search and navigation designed for screen reader users. Its source is on GitHub.
Kirk Adams
Blind since age five, a former president and CEO of both the American Foundation for the Blind and the Seattle Lighthouse for the Blind, now a professional keynote speaker on disability inclusion and accessible leadership.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Keynote speaking on disability inclusion and leadership — A sought-after keynote speaker at national and international conferences on accessibility, inclusive leadership, and resilience.
Nicholas Adams
A severely sight impaired developer who created a tool to type Universal English Braille on a standard keyboard, with no specialised hardware required.
Profiles:
Apps
- BrailleKeyboard — A Windows app that turns a standard keyboard into a UEB braille keyboard: the F, D, and S keys and the J, K, and L keys map to the six braille dots, and each chord generates ordinary text anywhere in the operating system. It supports contractions and custom wordsign dictionaries.
Peter Altschul
A mediator and organizational consultant.
Profiles:
Books
- Riding Elephants: Creating Common Ground Where Contention Rules (2021) — Brief essays arguing that common ground at home, at work, and in faith communities comes from guiding our unruly emotions with patience and deliberate thought.
- Breaking It Down and Connecting the Dots: Creating Common Ground Where Contention Rules (2017) — Essays on finding common ground and working through conflict in a divided world.
- Breaking Barriers: Working and Loving While Blind (2012) — A memoir of building a career and finding love as a man blind since birth, alongside the five guide dogs who shared the journey.
Taylor Arndt
Developer and Chief Operating Officer at Techopolis who builds Swift and web apps with accessibility designed in from the start.
Profiles:
Apps
- Start Testing — A fully accessible project management platform for organizations, covering projects, tasks, bugs, features, milestones, reviews, releases, and client collaboration, that keyboard and screen reader users can work in throughout; she built it at Techopolis.
- Swift Agents — Sixteen specialized Swift agents for Claude Code and GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code, published by Techopolis, that enforce Swift 6.2 concurrency, SwiftUI, Foundation Models, VoiceOver accessibility, security, and App Store compliance; free and MIT-licensed, with a one-command install.
- wx-accessible-webview — A wxPython library, installable with
pip install wx-accessible-webview, that makes embedded web views report correctly to screen readers such as JAWS and NVDA, solving a long-standing accessibility gap for blind developers building Python desktop apps. Also published on PyPI.
Books
- Getting Started with the MacBook Neo (2026) — A hands-on setup guide for blind and low-vision users of Apple’s MacBook Neo, walking through configuring a new machine from first boot.
Jeff Bishop
President of Blind Information Technology Solutions (BITS) and an IT accessibility consultant at the University of Arizona, who has presented assistive-technology topics for the blind community on Tek Talk and at VIBUG since 2020.
Profiles:
Apps
- GLOW Accessibility Toolkit — A BITS accessibility toolkit that audits, fixes, and templates Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown, PDF, and ePub documents to meet accessibility guidelines.
- Quill — A free, screen-reader-first writing and document environment for Windows and macOS, co-created with Taylor Arndt, that reads and writes nearly every document format, from Word, EPUB and PDF to braille files and DAISY talking books, with a spoken-echo history, Reveal Codes, and optional AI through a local model; a community module is adding equations that a screen reader user can explore term by term.
- Quill Radio — A free, standalone, screen-reader-first internet radio app for Windows and the successor to the ACB Radio Tuner: it plays every ACB Media stream out of the box plus tens of thousands of stations worldwide, with nested favorites, recording that survives a dropped connection, a wake-up timer, and NOAA weather radio.
Presentations
- Jeff Bishop Discusses the GLOW Accessibility Toolkit (2026) — His Tek Talk presentation on the GLOW toolkit, which audits, fixes, and templates Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Markdown, PDF, and ePub documents for accessibility.
- Jeff Bishop Discusses Microsoft Edge, Part 2 (2025) — A Tek Talk walkthrough of decluttering the Edge browser for cleaner, more efficient, privacy-focused browsing with a screen reader.
- Jeff Bishop Discusses iOS 18 and Its AI and Accessibility Features (2025) — A Tek Talk tour of the accessibility and AI features in the newest iPhone release.
Amy Bovaird
A Christian writer and memoirist who taught overseas for decades and writes with humor about sight loss and mobility.
Profiles:
Books
- Mobility Matters: Stepping Out in Faith (2014) — A memoir of resisting and then embracing white-cane training as retinitis pigmentosa takes her sight.
John Boyer
A software engineer from Minnesota who founded the nonprofit Computers to Help People and led the development of widely used open-source braille software until his death in 2023.
Profiles:
Apps
- Liblouis — The open-source braille translator and back-translator, named for Louis Braille, that produces the braille output used by NVDA, Orca, and many commercial tools.
- BrailleBlaster — A free, cross-platform application for transcribing print documents into well-formatted braille.
Laura Bratton
A keynote speaker and coach who became totally blind in her teens from a rod-and-cone dystrophy.
Profiles:
Books
- Harnessing Courage: Overcoming Adversity with Grit and Gratitude (2016) — A memoir of the first thirty years of her life and how she met vision loss and other adversity with grit and gratitude.
Tristen Breitenfeldt
A certified accessibility tester in Yakima, Washington, who writes about accessibility and universal design and has used a guide dog since 2006.
Profiles:
Apps
- ART (Accessibility Reporting Tool) — An open-source, local-first workspace for documenting accessibility findings, managing standards such as WCAG 2.1 and 2.2, and exporting reports to Word, Excel, PDF, and HTML, built for full keyboard and screen reader use; she conceived and built it with AI-assisted development.
Books
- The Blind Detective (2024) — Four mysteries for readers aged 10 to 12, in which a blind police detective, his guide dog Missy, and a friend solve cases while opening conversations about blindness and guide dog etiquette.
Shelly Brisbin
A technology journalist and podcaster.
Profiles:
Books
- iOS Access for All (2025) — A thorough guide to running the iPhone and iPad with VoiceOver and the other built-in accessibility features.
Molly Burke
A content creator and public speaker, and the first blind creator to pass one million YouTube subscribers.
Profiles:
Books
- Unseen: How I Lost My Vision but Found My Voice (2025) — A candid memoir about identity, self-acceptance, and being seen in a world built for the sighted.
Presentations
- Molly Burke — A large body of online video and public speaking on lifestyle, advocacy, and life as a blind woman.
Matt Campbell
Co-founder and CTO of Pneuma Solutions who has built accessibility software since the late 1990s, including work on Windows Narrator.
Profiles:
Apps
- AccessKit — A cross-platform Rust library that exposes accessibility APIs to UI toolkits on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
- Remote Incident Manager — An accessible cross-platform remote-support and remote-desktop tool for Windows and macOS.
Anthony R. Candela
A retired vocational-rehabilitation leader and athlete who went blind from retinitis pigmentosa, and a prolific author and essayist.
Profiles:
Books
- What Should Not Remain Silent (2024) — A collection of personal essays written between 2021 and 2024, responding to the politics, pandemic, and public events of those years and tying them to wider themes.
- Vision Dreams: A Parable (2019) — A dystopian science-fiction novella in which four companions chase their deepest wishes inside a fearful, hyper-vigilant society that hoards its resources for self-protection.
- Stand Up or Sit Out: Memories and Musings of a Blind Wrestler, Runner, and All-Around Regular Guy (2019) — A memoir traversing a lifetime of challenges, from his slow trek to blindness to life as a scholar-athlete.
Kim Charlson
The first woman president of the American Council of the Blind and director of the Perkins Braille and Talking Book Library.
Profiles:
Books
- Drawing with Your Perkins Brailler (2009) — Step-by-step instructions for creating three dozen tactile pictures — shapes, animals, and seasonal themes — on a Perkins Brailler.
Ann Chiappetta
A poet and memoirist.
Profiles:
Books
- Words of Life: Poems and Essays (2019) — Poems, essays, and flash fiction on nature, vision loss, family, and the writing life.
- Follow Your Dog: A Story of Love and Trust (2017) — A memoir about the trust and partnership between a handler and her guide dogs.
- Upwelling: Poems (2016) — Her debut poetry collection: 23 short, accessible poems on guide dogs, marriage, grief, and adjusting to blindness.
Peggy Chong
A historian and author known as The Blind History Lady.
Profiles:
Books
- Don Mahoney: Television Star (2021) — A biography of a blind entertainer who kept his blindness secret through a long television career.
- Karsten Ohnstad: I Wanted to Be a Teacher Just Like My Dad (2018) — A biography of a Minnesota boy who loses his sight over two years and must remake his path toward his dream of teaching, learning to trust himself as a blind man.
- John Swearingen: Know Your Place Blind Boy! (2017) — A biography of a man blinded at thirteen who battled prejudice to win an education, become a teacher, and champion quality schooling for all children in the American South after the Civil War.
Belo Cipriani
A writer, publisher, and digital-inclusion strategist, and founder of the disability publishing house Oleb Books.
Profiles:
Books
- Blind: A Memoir (2011) — An account of the two years of rehabilitation after a 2007 assault left him blind at twenty-six.
Naomi Cohn
A writer and teaching artist whose work explores vision loss, braille, and the natural world.
Profiles:
Books
- The Braille Encyclopedia: Brief Essays on Altered Sight (2024) — An abecedarian memoir in brief essays and prose poems on losing her sight and learning braille as an adult.
Anthony Corona
A podcast host and producer in the blind community.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Sunday Edition — Host and producer of Sunday Edition and a family of blindness-focused podcasts, with live streaming on Corona FM.
Michael “Mick” Curran
The original creator of NVDA and co-founded NV Access to sustain it.
Profiles:
Apps
- NVDA — The free, open-source NonVisual Desktop Access screen reader for Windows, co-created with James Teh.
Dash
A Poland-based developer who publishes small, keyboard-friendly Windows utilities as TD Programs, also written Piksel Dash, and belongs to the three-person Soft Programmers team.
Profiles:
Apps
- TD Sound Manager — Opens the classic Windows audio panels, unmutes playback, and switches between sound cards with global hotkeys or a menu.
- Mini Load — A lightweight downloader for media from popular platforms, built on yt-dlp and FFmpeg with a keyboard-friendly interface, rewritten in C# and updated in August 2026.
- FM-DX Servers Lister — Lists public FM-DX radio receivers by country, with search, favourites, and status details, replacing a map that screen readers cannot use.
Scott Davert
A DeafBlind assistive-technology specialist at the Helen Keller National Center and a longtime member of the AppleVis editorial team, focused on using braille displays with iOS.
Profiles:
Presentations
- AppleVis braille demonstrations — His hands-on AppleVis podcast demonstrations of braille displays and the Braille Access feature on iPhone and Mac, from a DeafBlind perspective.
Wendy S. David
A blind traveler and writer.
Books
- Sites Unseen: Traveling the World Without Sight (2010) — A travel memoir of seeing the world as a blind traveler, in the company of a series of guide dogs.
Judy Dixon
A longtime writer on access technology.
Profiles:
Books
- Designing Documents for Appearance: Using a Screen Reader to Create Eye-Catching Newsletters, Flyers, Certificates, and More (2022) — How to use a screen reader to create visually polished newsletters, flyers, certificates, and similar documents.
- The Power of PowerPoint: Using a Screen Reader to Create Attention-Grabbing Presentations (2022) — How to build attention-grabbing presentations using a screen reader.
- 31 Cool Things You Can Do with Your iPhone: From Fun, to Practical, to Entertaining (2019) — A collection of fun, practical, and entertaining things blind and low-vision users can do with an iPhone.
Michael Doise
iOS and macOS developer, creator of the Perspective suite of apps and the engineer behind the ACB Link app.
Profiles:
Apps
- ACB Link — The American Council of the Blind’s official app for iOS and Android.
- Perspective Intelligence — A private, on-device AI assistant for iPhone, iPad, and Mac that chats, transcribes audio, and recognizes text in images.
- WayAround — A smartphone labeling app for iPhone, iPad, and Android whose mobile versions he develops: users tap reusable NFC WayTags to record and read back custom details about clothing, medications, food, and other everyday items.
Thomas “AnonyMouse” Domville
A blind member of the AppleVis editorial team, and its most prolific presenter of VoiceOver app walkthroughs and news shows.
Profiles:
Presentations
- AppleVis app walkthroughs — His long-running series of hands-on VoiceOver demonstrations of iOS, Mac, and HomePod apps and features for blind and low-vision users.
- Apple Crunch — A monthly AppleVis news show he hosts, breaking down Apple developments for the blind and low-vision community.
Anna Dresner
Writes accessible-technology books for National Braille Press.
Profiles:
Books
- Computers You Can Talk To: Siri, Alexa, Google Now, and Cortana — An introduction to using voice assistants on phones, computers, and smart speakers.
Tommy “The Blind Film Critic” Edison
A film critic and radio presenter.
Profiles:
Presentations
- The Blind Film Critic (2011) — A long-running YouTube series reviewing films by script, music, and sound, alongside candid talks about blindness.
Lucy Edwards
A broadcaster and content creator, and the first blind presenter on BBC Radio 1.
Profiles:
Books
- Blind Not Broken: Your Guide to Turning Loss and Grief into Happiness (2024) — Part memoir, part guide to moving through grief toward independence after sudden sight loss.
Presentations
- Lucy Edwards — Broadcasting and a large body of online video on lifestyle, beauty, and life without sight.
Paul Edwards
A past president of the American Council of the Blind and a former Miami-Dade College professor, now a podcast host in the blindness community.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Tuesday Topics — Host of a regular ACB Media Network podcast that explores a single topic from a blindness perspective in depth each week, featuring panelists and live questions from the audience.
Liam Erven
Self-employed audio-game designer and founder of LWorks, making accessible games since 2002.
Profiles:
Apps
- LWorks audio games — A catalog of fully accessible audio games, including LWorks Arcade, Pigeon Panic, Super Egg Hunt Plus, and a browser-based Super Liam 2 alpha.
David L. Faucheux
Profiles:
Books
- Across Two Novembers: A Year in the Life of a Blind Bibliophile (2016) — A year-long diary woven through with books, food, music, and memory.
Michael Feir
A Canadian author and broadcaster who gives his books away for free.
Profiles:
Books
- Personal Power: The iOS Edition (2025) — A wide-ranging guide to getting the most from an iPhone or iPad as a totally blind user.
Chancey Fleet
Blind tech educator and the founding Assistive Technology Coordinator at the New York Public Library’s Andrew Heiskell Braille and Talking Book Library; a 2017 Library Journal Mover and Shaker who speaks widely on blindness, accessibility, and equity in the digital commons.
Profiles:
Presentations
- De-visualizing Technology: the Joys and Frictions of Blindness in the Digital Commons — A keynote on the lived experience of non-visual computing and the friction blind users meet in everyday technology.
- Dark Patterns in Accessibility Tech — A Data & Society talk on “ghost written” code and the state of non-visual access to digital interactions.
Kelly Ford
Longtime accessibility leader who publishes accessible Windows utilities and Apple-platform tools.
Profiles:
Apps
- QuickMail — A screen-reader-friendly email client for Windows and IMAP servers, with conversations, flags, attachments, shared mailboxes, and an in-app bug reporter that needs no GitHub account; portable and installer builds, including ARM.
- WeatherFast — A clutter-free iOS weather app built by and for VoiceOver users, with a “Weather Around Me” feature for tracking conditions in nearby cities and historical weather going back decades.
- Image Description Toolkit — A batch image description tool that describes whole folders of images with a choice of vision models, local through Ollama or online through OpenAI, Claude or Apple Intelligence, and includes a chat client built for keyboard and screen reader use.
Chad E. Foster
A corporate executive and motivational speaker, and the first blind graduate of the Harvard Business School leadership program.
Profiles:
Books
- Blind Ambition: How to Go from Victim to Visionary (2021) — An autobiographical account of turning the loss of sight into a competitive strength in business and life.
Presentations
- Keynote speaking — Keynote addresses on resilience and turning constraints into advantage, delivered to audiences worldwide.
Bryan Garaventa
Accessibility engineer and W3C ARIA Working Group member, formerly an accessibility fellow at SSB BART Group and Level Access, who builds open-source JavaScript libraries for accessible dynamic web content.
Profiles:
Apps
- AccDC API — A JavaScript engine that renders dynamic web content with accessibility built in for screen-reader and keyboard users.
- AccDC Technical Style Guide — A library of tested, accessible interface-widget patterns and practical ARIA design guidance.
Tony Gebhard
A totally blind musician and assistive technology instructor from Michigan who builds free, keyboard-first tools for screen reader users.
Profiles:
Apps
- NVDA Coach — A free NVDA add-on, in the NVDA Add-on Store, that teaches screen reader commands from inside NVDA through 45 guided, hands-on lessons with spoken instructions, hints, and built-in practice forms and web pages; he built it as an assistive technology instructor for beginners and their teachers.
- TG Drop Deck — A free, MIT-licensed soundboard and playout desk for podcasts, radio, and live shows on Windows and Mac, with eighty sounds on the number row, a crossfading playlist, a processed microphone, recording, and streaming, all built keyboard-first for screen reader users.
Books
- No Sight Required — The Blind User’s Guide to AI (2026) — A practical guide to using ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini with NVDA, JAWS, VoiceOver, and TalkBack.
Presentations
- The Tony Gebhard Show — A weekly podcast spotlighting the lives, work, and triumphs of people in the disability community across music, technology, and advocacy.
Quin Gillespie
Systems-level developer at Pneuma Solutions.
Profiles:
Apps
- Paperback — A free, fast, fully accessible document and e-book reader for Windows, macOS and Linux, with paid Android and iOS editions, whose 1.0 release in October 2026 reads EPUB, PDF (with OCR of scanned pages), MOBI and AZW3, comic archives, M4B and MP3 audiobooks and many older formats, speaks MathML through MathCAT, and navigates by headings, pages, links and tables.
- Codestats — A very fast command-line code-analysis tool that reports detailed statistics about a codebase across 544 programming languages, with prebuilt binaries for Linux, macOS, and Windows.
Haben Girma
An attorney, disability-rights advocate, and internationally sought keynote speaker.
Profiles:
Books
- Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law (2019) — A memoir of a refugee family, Harvard Law, and a life spent making the world more accessible.
Presentations
- Keynote addresses — Keynote presentations for organizations worldwide, including a TIME100 Talk, on disability and innovation.
M. Leona Godin
A writer, performer, and educator.
Profiles:
Books
- There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness (2021) — A blend of memoir and cultural history tracing how blindness has shaped art, language, and ideas.
David Goldfield
A blindness assistive technology specialist with more than thirty years of experience who trains blind computer users, runs the Tech-VI announcement list, and presents live webinars and training sessions for Blazie Technologies.
Profiles:
Presentations
- David Goldfield Discusses the BT Braille (2026) — His Tek Talk presentation for Accessible World on the BT Braille, a Braille-first computer with an eight-dot keyboard and speech and Braille output, with audience questions.
- An Introduction to Web Browsing on BT Speak and BT Braille (2026) — A live Blazie Technologies training session he leads on browsing the web with Chromium and Firefox, browse and focus modes, forms, and Orca settings.
- An Introduction to Desktop Mode (2026) — A live Blazie Technologies webinar he hosts on the Desktop Mode of the BT Speak and BT Braille, covering Orca speech settings, the Applications menu, and LibreOffice Writer.
Sherry Gomes
A novelist who writes contemporary inspirational fiction.
Profiles:
Books
- Haven (2021) — A contemporary novel about a blind mother building a new life and finding love in a small town.
Glen Gordon
The original architect of the JAWS screen reader; previously a Software Fellow at Freedom Scientific.
Apps
- JAWS — Job Access With Speech, the long-standing and widely used commercial Windows screen reader.
Jeremy Grandstaff
A blind organizational-culture consultant, facilitator, and keynote speaker.
Profiles:
Presentations
- A Blind Man’s Path to Opportunity (TEDxYpsilanti) — His TEDx talk; he also speaks at conferences such as M-Enabling, moderates accessibility panels and webinars, and runs a virtual roundtables program.
Lucy Greco
Blind since birth, the longtime web accessibility evangelist at the University of California, Berkeley, who wrote the UC system’s electronic accessibility policy and reviews everyday appliances for blind users on video.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Know Before You Buy (2021) — Her video series testing whether household appliances can be used without sight, so blind shoppers know before they buy and product designers see how a blind user meets a touch panel.
- A History of Digital Accessibility — A UC Tech webinar tracing accessibility at Berkeley from its first blind graduate in 1896 through the disability rights movement to today’s campus policy.
- Achieving an Accessibility Policy at the University of California (2014) — Her CSUN Assistive Technology Conference presentation on why a university needs an accessibility policy and how the UC system adopted one.
Sanford D. Greenberg
An entrepreneur, investor, and philanthropist working to end blindness.
Profiles:
Books
- Hello Darkness, My Old Friend: How Daring Dreams and Unyielding Friendship Turned One Man’s Blindness Into an Extraordinary Vision for Life (2020) — A memoir of going blind at nineteen and building a life of achievement through enduring friendship.
John B. Grimes
A writer and podcaster who lost his sight to bacterial meningitis in college.
Profiles:
Books
- Destiny Is Debatable: A Memoir of Meningitis, Losing Sight, and the Love I Didn’t See Coming (2026) — A candid, darkly funny memoir about surviving meningitis, going blind, and rebuilding a life and a family.
Christine Ha
A chef, writer, and television host; the first blind winner of MasterChef.
Profiles:
Books
- Recipes from My Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food (2013) — A cookbook of Vietnamese and American comfort food, woven through with personal narrative.
Presentations
- MasterChef (2012) — Won the third season of MasterChef, then hosted and judged cooking television and gave TEDx and United Nations talks.
Alex Hall
A blind member of the AppleVis editorial team who demonstrates Mac and iOS apps and introduces blind users to programming.
Profiles:
Presentations
- AppleVis app and programming demos — His AppleVis walkthroughs of apps such as Audio Hijack and Voice Dream Writer, plus an introductory VoiceOver series on programming with Xcode.
Brian Hartgen
A blind UK JAWS scripter, trainer, and radio presenter who co-owns Hartgen Consultancy, runs the online station Team-FM, and was a founding member of Mushroom FM.
Profiles:
Apps
- J-Say — Links JAWS with Dragon speech recognition so a blind person can control the computer, dictate, and hear text echoed back entirely by voice, with deep support for Word, Outlook, and web browsers.
- Leasey — A suite of JAWS scripts that simplifies common Windows tasks for users of all experience levels.
- Zoom Professional Scripts — JAWS scripts that make Zoom meetings easier to run and join, with sound cues for muted participants and raised hands and quick moves between the participants list and waiting room.
Books
- Chrome Plated Revisited: Using Google Chrome with JAWS for Windows (2026) — A 2026 text training book, in Word and HTML, showing JAWS for Windows users how to browse efficiently with Google Chrome, from tabs, forms, and tables to extensions, passwords, and AI features.
- Time to Go Zoom Revisited (2026) — A roughly 550-page, keyboard-driven text book teaching JAWS for Windows users to join, host, schedule, record, and manage Zoom Workplace meetings, webinars, and Zoom Phone.
- Winning Teams Version 3 — A fully rewritten text training book, in Word and HTML, on using Microsoft Teams efficiently with JAWS for Windows, covering chats, channels, meetings, calls, and files.
Presentations
- The Music Machine with Brian Hartgen — A long-running weekly music show on Team-FM with themed hours, features, and chances for listeners to interact.
- Sunday Gold with Brian Hartgen — A weekly Team-FM show of golden oldies from the 1950s and 1960s, with music history and a countdown from a chosen year.
- Brian Hartgen Talks All Things ElBraille — An Accessible World Tek Talk presentation in which he discusses the ElBraille in depth.
Mary Hiland
A writer, retired nonprofit leader, and longtime guide dog handler.
Profiles:
Books
- Insight Out: One Blind Woman’s View of Her Life (2019) — A frank, warm memoir of the everyday strategies and experiences of living without sight.
- The Bumpy Road to Assisted Living: A Daughter’s Memoir (2017) — A daughter’s account, as an only and blind child, of moving her mother into assisted living.
Donna W. Hill
A songwriter and novelist.
Profiles:
Books
- The Heart of Applebutter Hill (2013) — A young-adult adventure novel with a blind heroine and her guide dog at its center.
James Tate Hill
A novelist and memoirist, and a contributing editor at Literary Hub.
Profiles:
Books
- Blind Man’s Bluff: A Memoir (2021) — A candid, often funny memoir about being declared legally blind at sixteen and spending fifteen years hiding it.
Michael Hingson
Blind since birth; a 9/11 survivor, international keynote speaker, and bestselling author.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Unstoppable Mindset — His weekly podcast on resilience and inclusion, with more than 440 episodes, alongside 100-plus keynote presentations a year worldwide.
Meriç Karaca
The developer and founder of ZeroVisionLabs, who publishes free, VoiceOver-first iPhone apps for blind and low-vision users in more than a dozen languages.
Profiles:
Apps
- Zerogram — A free, independent Telegram client for iPhone built on Telegram’s official TDLib library and designed from the ground up for VoiceOver: a message reads as who, when, and what in one tap, voice messages announce their length, and play, pause, and seek are rotor actions.
- zEdit — A fully accessible video and audio editor for iPhone and Android that trims, merges, reorders, and mixes clips and adds sound effects, filters, subtitles, and audio description, with every screen tested against VoiceOver; also on Google Play.
Deborah Kendrick
A columnist and journalist on disability.
Profiles:
Books
- Health Care Professionals Who Are Blind or Visually Impaired — Profiles of blind and low-vision people working across the health professions.
- Navigating Healthcare When All They Can See Is That You Can’t — A guide to advocating for yourself in medical settings as a blind or low-vision patient.
- When Your Ears Can’t Help You See: Strategies for Blind and Low Vision Individuals with Hearing Loss — Techniques and technologies for navigating blindness alongside hearing loss.
Deborah Kent
A prolific author of fiction and nonfiction for young readers and adults.
Books
- Elizabeth Blackwell: Physician and Health Educator (2004) — A biography of the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States.
George Kerscher
Blind since his thirties, chief innovations officer of the DAISY Consortium and a longtime leader of the accessible-publishing and EPUB standards community, who coined the term “print disabled.”
Profiles:
Presentations
- Opening Keynote, Digital Publishing Summit (2024) — The opening keynote of EDRLab’s Digital Publishing Summit in Paris, a personal history of accessible digital publishing from the first talking books to the European Accessibility Act.
- Accessibility Baked In: Publishing, Accessibility, and W3C Standards (2020) — His segment of a DAISY webinar on building accessibility into every stage of publishing, with Ace by DAISY, the SMART tool, and accessibility metadata.
- EPUB 3 and Accessibility, Digital Book Conference (2011) — His conference slides on the DAISY Consortium’s role in EPUB 3 and the work needed to make the format fully accessible.
Reuben Kigame
A Kenyan gospel musician, scholar, and theologian, blind since early childhood, and a longtime disability-rights advocate.
Profiles:
Books
- Christian Apologetics Through African Eyes (2018) — A wide-ranging reference work defending the Christian faith from an African perspective.
Robert Kingett
A journalist.
Profiles:
Books
- Off the Grid: Living Blind Without the Internet (2015) — A firsthand account of going without the internet as a blind man.
David Kingsbury
An assistive-technology instructor at the Carroll Center for the Blind.
Profiles:
Books
- The Windows Screen Reader Primer: All the Basics and More (2024) — A teaching guide for JAWS, NVDA, and Narrator users covering Windows, Office, browsers, and more.
Daniel Kish
An expert in human echolocation and founder of World Access for the Blind.
Profiles:
Presentations
- How I Use Sonar to Navigate the World (2015) — A widely viewed TED talk on FlashSonar echolocation, part of a sustained body of talks and teaching.
Georgina Kleege
A writer and disability studies scholar who lectures in English at the University of California, Berkeley.
Profiles:
Books
- More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art (2018) — An exploration of blindness and visual art: how blindness is represented, how blind artists work, and how museums can offer genuine access.
- Blind Rage: Letters to Helen Keller (2006) — A work of creative nonfiction addressed to Helen Keller, reckoning with the myth built around her and what it has meant for other blind people.
Ryan Knighton
A Canadian writer and teacher who lost his sight to retinitis pigmentosa.
Profiles:
Books
- C’mon Papa: Dispatches from a Dad in the Dark (2010) — His second memoir, a funny and harrowing account of his first year of fatherhood as a blind dad.
- Cockeyed: A Memoir (2006) — An irreverent, tragicomic memoir of his fifteen-year descent into blindness.
Stephen Kuusisto
A poet and University Professor at Syracuse University.
Profiles:
Books
- Old Horse, What Is to Be Done? (2020) — A poetry collection of spare, sound-driven lyrics moving through memory, aging, and the natural world.
- Have Dog, Will Travel: A Poet’s Journey (2018) — A lyrical memoir about independence and the bond with a first guide dog.
- Letters to Borges (2013) — Poems addressed to the blind writer Jorge Luis Borges as a traveler’s letters from shifting cities, where blindness opens onto invented landscapes.
Bobbi LaChance
A romance novelist.
Books
- The Journey: A Life in Three Parts (2013) — A romance following Carrie, a divorced nurse’s aide and mother of two, whose life changes when she meets a charming newspaper reporter with political ambitions.
- Cobwebs (2012) — A novel.
Pete Lane
A blind podcaster and longtime Blind Abilities co-host who produces hands-on demo series on macOS, iOS, and audio production.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Blind Abilities demo series — His solo tutorial series for blind users, including the GarageBand, Amadeus Pro, and iPhone 101 VoiceOver series, demonstrating Mac and iOS tools step by step.
Doug Lee
Assistive-technology programmer known for a large catalog of JAWS scripts and cross-platform Python tools.
Profiles:
Apps
- TTCom — A cross-platform, command-line TeamTalk client written in Python.
Joseph Lee
One of the most prolific authors of NVDA add-ons.
Profiles:
Apps
- Add-on Updater — Keeps other NVDA add-ons up to date.
- StationPlaylist — Gives NVDA users accessible control of StationPlaylist broadcasting software.
- Windows App Essentials — Improves NVDA access to built-in Windows apps.
Andrew Leland
A writer and audio producer.
Profiles:
Books
- The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight (2023) — A Pulitzer-finalist memoir of going blind that doubles as an exploration of the culture and history of blindness.
Andre “Onj” Louis
A blind musician, producer, and accessibility advocate from London who builds accessibility-first Windows tools; he was the first blind person to beta-test Native Instruments’ Komplete Kontrol accessibility features.
Profiles:
Apps
- Sensor Readout — An accessibility-first hardware monitoring tool that reports a computer’s sensor readings, such as temperatures and fan speeds, to screen reader users.
- Clipman — An accessible clipboard manager for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iPhone and iPad that keeps a searchable, organizable history for fast keyboard and screen reader use, with optional encrypted sync across devices.
Stephen Lovely
A developer in British Columbia, blind since birth, who builds AI visual-assistance tools through natural-language development rather than traditional coding.
Profiles:
Apps
- Vision AI Assistant — A progressive web app for iPhone and Android that lets users explore a photo by moving a finger across it, get brief live descriptions from the camera, track an object to walk toward it, and read signs and printed books, with optional voice commands; he builds it by describing features in plain language on the Base44 platform.
Tony Malykh
Software engineer who publishes a popular family of NVDA add-ons.
Profiles:
Apps
- BrowserNav — Fast, structured navigation of web and document content in NVDA.
- Tony’s Enhancements — A bundle of quality-of-life tweaks for NVDA.
Dean Martineau
A screen-reader trainer.
Profiles:
Books
- Get Cracking with Chrome for Windows (2019) — A practical guide to using the Chrome browser efficiently with a screen reader.
- Windows Keyboard Power User Guide (2019) — Keyboard commands and customizations across Windows, JAWS, and Microsoft Word for faster, more effective screen-reader use.
Jamal Mazrui
Accessibility officer and developer who publishes accessibility and developer tooling, the Homer Development Kit his apps share, and books built for screen readers, including a 2026 guide to building apps nonvisually with AI.
Profiles:
Apps
- 2htm — Converts Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, and Markdown files into accessible HTML that preserves headings, lists, tables, and image alt text.
- extCheck — Checks the accessibility of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Markdown files, writing per-file CSV reports of issues found by an extensible rule registry.
- urlCheck — Drives Microsoft Edge through Playwright to run axe-core on each page, producing per-page reports plus a session-level Accessibility Conformance Report against all 86 WCAG 2.2 success criteria.
Books
- Blind Vibe Coding: Building Apps Nonvisually with AI (2026) — Sixteen hands-on tutorials for screen reader users who want to build their own apps with help from AI, from a talking timer in a chat window to Windows programs, NVDA add-ons, browser extensions and phone apps, with a nonvisual release checklist and a glossary.
- Strange Truths: Objective Stories that Challenge Our Understanding of the World (2026) — An omnibus that gathers the author’s Strange Truths series of accessible books on science, history, and the limits of human knowledge.
- Mastery in Nonvisual Accomplishment: Among the Greatest Blind Persons of All Time (2026) — Profiles of some of the greatest blind achievers across many fields.
J.J. Meddaugh
A blind accessibility consultant and app developer, and owner of A. T. Guys, who designs and tests mobile and web apps with screen reader users in mind.
Profiles:
Apps
- NFB 2026 Convention Web App — An accessible web app for attendees of the 2026 National Federation of the Blind national convention in Austin, Texas.
Steven B. Mendelsohn
An attorney who works in disability law.
Profiles:
Books
- People With Disabilities and Employment Law: Recent Developments, Emerging Issues, and What They Mean in Everyday Life (2016) — An overview of disability employment law and what recent changes mean in daily life.
Tyler Merren
A blind personal trainer and five-time Paralympic goalball athlete who created an audio-first fitness app for blind and low-vision users.
Profiles:
Apps
- ReVision Fitness — An audio fitness program for iPhone and Android whose exercises, workouts, and equipment guides are described for blind and low-vision users with clock-face directions and step-by-step instructions; built with a Holman Prize.
Joshua A. Miele
A scientist, designer, and accessibility innovator, and a 2021 MacArthur Fellow.
Profiles:
Books
- Connecting Dots: A Blind Life (2025) — A memoir of curiosity and invention, tracing a path through science, activism, and the disability rights movement.
Selina Mills
An award-winning journalist and broadcaster, legally blind, who has reported for Reuters, The Daily Telegraph, and the BBC.
Profiles:
Books
- Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness (2023) — A personal, often witty cultural history of blindness in the West, woven through her own loss of sight.
Mark Morad
A developer who lost his sight as a university freshman, then taught himself to program with a screen reader and built an AI accessibility assistant now used by people in dozens of countries.
Profiles:
Apps
- ScribeMe — An AI-powered accessibility assistant for iPhone and iPad that makes documents and images accessible, with OCR in more than fifty languages that labels headings, lists, and tables and generates alt text, plus a Live Assist mode that describes surroundings continuously in real time and works with Meta AI glasses.
Jalil Mortazavi
Profiles:
Books
- The Mystery of America: What I Learned and Love About this Country (2018) — Reflections from an immigrant on what he came to admire about the United States.
Jonathan Mosen
A broadcaster and author of many technology guides; host of the National Federation of the Blind’s Access On podcast.
Profiles:
Books
- iOS Without the Eye — A comprehensive guide to operating the iPhone and iPad without sight.
- Become an Amadeus Pro Maestro — An audio tutorial that teaches blind Mac users to record, edit, and produce audio with the Amadeus Pro multitrack editor using VoiceOver.
Presentations
- Access On — Host of the National Federation of the Blind’s weekly technology podcast.
Marc Mulcahy
Principal software development engineer at Amazon Lab126 who created the first working prototype of the Orca screen reader and co-founded LevelStar.
Profiles:
Apps
- VoiceView — Amazon’s built-in screen reader for Fire tablets, Fire TV, and Echo Show smart displays.
Dave Nason
A blind member of the AppleVis editorial team and co-host of the AppleVis Extra podcast who also produces solo quick-tip VoiceOver demonstrations.
Profiles:
Presentations
- AppleVis quick tips and Extra — His solo VoiceOver quick-tip demonstrations for iOS and macOS, alongside co-hosting the AppleVis Extra discussion show.
Chris Nova
Founder of Mystic Access and a totally blind assistive-technology instructor with more than thirty years in the field.
Profiles:
Presentations
- The Mystic Access Podcast (2007) — Founded and hosts the long-running, regularly published podcast on assistive technology, alongside a large library of audio tutorials produced from a blindness perspective.
Kim Nova
Director of product development at Mystic Access, a totally blind instructor, writer, and regular podcast co-host who also writes as Kim Loftis.
Profiles:
Books
- Dating in the Digital Age: An Accessible Journey for Finding Love Online (2019) — A practical guide to online dating as a blind or low-vision user, covering self-presentation, safety, disclosure, and the accessibility of major dating platforms.
Presentations
- Mystic Access audio tutorials and podcast — A body of solo audio tutorials on devices such as the Victor Reader Stream, BrailleNote Touch, and Alexa, plus a long-running role co-hosting the Mystic Access podcast.
Gary O’Donoghue
A BBC News journalist, blind since childhood, who serves as the corporation’s chief North America correspondent and was the BBC’s first blind foreign correspondent.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Putting News First: Breaking Down Stereotypes as a Blind Journalist (2016) — A featured address at the National Federation of the Blind national convention on his career reporting for BBC News across radio, television, and online, from Westminster to Washington.
James H. Omvig
A rehabilitation leader and former federal official.
Profiles:
Books
- Freedom for the Blind: The Secret is Empowerment (2002) — An argument that strong training and high expectations are the real keys to independence.
Ann K. Parsons
Profiles:
Books
- The Demmies: A Novel (2017) — A science-fiction novel.
Ken Perry
Senior software engineer at the American Printing House for the Blind (APH) and a volunteer programming instructor; a contributor to the Liblouis braille translation library (see Liblouis).
Profiles:
Apps
- Graphiti — A refreshable tactile graphics display he leads at APH, presenting braille and images on a pin array.
Chris Peterson
Founder and CEO of Penny Forward, a nonprofit offering financial education by and for blind people; he is totally blind and an accredited financial counselor.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Penny Forward Podcast — Founder and host of a weekly podcast about blind people’s financial lives, interviewing blind entrepreneurs and professionals about building successful personal, professional, and financial futures.
J. Pinto
Profiles:
Books
- Braided Love (2023) — A young-adult novel about two girls discovering what family means over a summer on a Colorado ranch.
- Daddy Won’t Let Mom Drive the Car: True Tales of Parenting in the Dark (2019) — Warm, funny short vignettes about raising a sighted daughter as a blind mother.
- The Bright Side of Darkness (2015) — A novel.
André Polykanine
Backend software engineer and accessibility specialist in Strasbourg, France, blind since birth; co-founder of Oire Software with his wife Nathalie, a longtime JAWS beta tester, and CTO of AccessMind, maker of the Optima braille laptop.
Profiles:
Apps
- SIC! (Simple Image Converter) — A Windows image converter with batch conversion across eight formats, resize and crop, multi-size icon creation, a command-line mode, and signed automatic updates.
- Iridium — A PHP security library for encrypting data, hashing passwords, and managing secure tokens, installable via Composer.
- PlanCake — A free Windows Markdown reader and annotating tool, released in October 2026 for reviewing the long plans written with AI coding tools: open a Markdown file, move by headings, lists, links and tables, press Enter to add a note that is stored inside the file itself, export the document to HTML and the notes to JSON, with no telemetry.
Shaun Preece
A broadcaster who solo-hosts the monthly show Shaun of the Shed and co-hosts Double Tap.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Shaun of the Shed — His own monthly show, on AMI-audio, YouTube, and podcast, guiding people who are newer to technology.
Mika Pyyhkala
A blind technology and accessibility professional in Boston and second vice president of the National Federation of the Blind of Massachusetts, who has demonstrated apps, devices, and services for the VIBUG blind-technology user group since 2007.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Be My Eyes New Features (2023) — A VIBUG demonstration of new features in the Be My Eyes app.
- Smart Locks (2022) — A VIBUG talk and demonstration on choosing and using smart locks as a blind user.
- Getting COVID-19 Tests (2021) — A VIBUG talk on the ways to obtain COVID-19 tests, including home kits, and the technology and accessibility problems each one poses.
T. V. Raman
Computer scientist at Google and a pioneer of auditory user interfaces.
Profiles:
Apps
- Emacspeak — The “Complete Audio Desktop,” an actively maintained speech interface built on Emacs for Linux and other systems.
Mark Riccobono
President of the National Federation of the Blind since 2014 and himself blind; in 2011 he became the first blind person to drive a street vehicle in public using nonvisual technology.
Profiles:
Presentations
- National Convention Banquet Addresses — The banquet address he delivers each July at the National Federation of the Blind national convention, a decade-long body of featured speeches on blindness, dignity, and the organized blind movement.
Derek Riemer
Software engineer at Google who has written NVDA core code and a large set of add-ons.
Profiles:
Apps
- NVDA add-ons — Roughly two dozen NVDA add-ons plus contributions to NVDA core.
Maud Rowell
A freelance journalist and writer in London who went blind at nineteen and now writes to educate others about sight loss.
Profiles:
Books
- Blind Spot: Exploring and Educating on Blindness (2021) — A brief, wide-ranging primer on blindness across visibility, accessibility, and culture, drawn from her own life and from blind pioneers through history.
Lisa Salinger
A Mystic Access instructor and longtime co-host of the Mystic Access podcast.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Mystic Access audio tutorials — Independently authored, course-length audio tutorials, including a 4.5-hour Apple Watch guide and a 5-hour VarioUltra course, alongside a sustained role co-hosting the Mystic Access podcast.
Fredric K. Schroeder
A longtime National Federation of the Blind leader and former US Rehabilitation Services Administration commissioner who was elected president of the World Blind Union in 2016.
Presentations
- The Blind of the World: Spreading the Federation Message (2015) — A national convention general-session address on carrying the organized blind movement’s message around the world.
- The Blind in the World: Leadership, Philosophy, and Action on a Global Scale (2016) — A national convention address delivered the year he was elected president of the World Blind Union.
- The World Blind Union: Future Challenges and Opportunities (2016) — An address surveying the global agenda for the rights and opportunities of blind people.
Steven Scott
A radio broadcaster of more than twenty years who created the United Kingdom’s first technology radio show for blind listeners; he also co-hosts Double Tap.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Technology radio for blind listeners — Created and presented the first UK technology radio show for blind and partially sighted listeners across a long broadcasting career.
Sam Seavey
A low-vision creator whose channel The Blind Life reviews assistive technology.
Profiles:
Presentations
- The Blind Life (2013) — A long-running YouTube channel and podcast of assistive-technology reviews and low-vision tips.
Saqib Shaikh
Microsoft software engineer who founded and leads the Seeing AI project.
Profiles:
Apps
- Seeing AI — A free app that narrates the visual world for blind and low-vision users, on iOS and Android.
Tyler Spivey
Developer of remote-access and console screen-reading tools.
Profiles:
Apps
- NVDA Remote — An add-on, co-created with Christopher Toth, for controlling a remote computer with NVDA; it was folded into NVDA core in 2025.
- tdsr — A lightweight console screen reader for macOS and Linux terminals.
Adrian Spratt
A lawyer and novelist.
Profiles:
Books
- Caroline (2021) — A novel about a young blind lawyer in 1980s New York and a love that shapes him.
Maribel Steel
An Australian author, speaker, and memoirist who is legally blind from retinitis pigmentosa.
Profiles:
Books
- Blindness for Beginners: A Renewed Vision of the Possible (2018) — Part memoir, part practical guide to adjusting emotionally and practically to vision loss.
Penn Street
A blind disability advocate and outdoor enthusiast who lost most of her sight at age nine.
Profiles:
Presentations
- The Blind Chick — Aftersight’s flagship weekly podcast, with hundreds of episodes sharing the stories of blind and low-vision people, which she hosts.
Red Szell
A British crime novelist, broadcaster, and climber who is registered blind from retinitis pigmentosa.
Profiles:
Books
- The Blind Man of Hoy: A True Story (2014) — An account of becoming the first blind person to climb the Old Man of Hoy, the 449-foot sea stack off Orkney.
David S. Tatel
A retired judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Profiles:
Books
- Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice (2024) — A memoir of a distinguished legal career and of coming to terms with blindness.
Abbie Johnson Taylor
A novelist, poet, and memoirist.
Profiles:
Books
- Living Vicariously in Wyoming: Stories (2025) — A collection of twenty-five short stories, most set in Wyoming, about ordinary people navigating love, loss, and upheaval.
- Why Grandma Doesn’t Know Me (2021) — A novel in which a teenager, told a family secret by her grandmother with dementia, sets out to find her biological father and reshapes the whole family.
- My Ideal Partner: How I Met, Married, and Cared For the Man I Loved Despite Debilitating Odds (2016) — A memoir of love and caregiving through her husband’s disabling illness.
James “Jamie” Teh
Co-founder of NV Access and is now an accessibility tech lead at Mozilla.
Profiles:
Apps
- NVDA (co-founder) — Co-created the NVDA screen reader;
- OSARA — Makes the REAPER digital-audio workstation accessible on Windows and macOS.
Carter Temm
Accessibility consultant and software developer focused on AI-assisted tooling.
Profiles:
Apps
- AI Content Describer — An NVDA add-on that uses AI to describe images and on-screen content.
Jeff Thompson
The founder and host of the Blind Abilities podcast.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Blind Abilities — A podcast of interviews, demonstrations, and stories from a blindness perspective.
Christopher “Q” Toth
Founder of Accessible Apps / Q Software Solutions.
Profiles:
Apps
- CAPTCHA Be Gone — A service and browser integration that solves CAPTCHAs accessibly.
- NVDA Remote (co-created) — Co-created NVDA Remote;
- QRead — An accessible Windows e-reader for documents and books.
Sam Tupy
C++ developer focused on accessible games and game tooling.
Profiles:
Apps
- NVGT — The NonVisual Gaming Toolkit, a cross-platform engine and scripting environment for building audio games.
- Survive the Wild — A multiplayer survival audio game.
Larry Turnbull (d. 2020)
The longtime director of ACB Radio, the American Council of the Blind’s internet radio network, who traveled nationally and internationally to broadcast blindness-community conventions.
Profiles:
Presentations
- Handy Around the House — His own ACB Radio show sharing home-repair and maintenance tips for blind and low-vision listeners.
Erik Weihenmayer
An adventurer and athlete, the first blind person to summit Mount Everest.
Profiles:
Books
- Touch the Top of the World: A Blind Man’s Journey to Climb Farther than the Eye Can See (2001) — A bestselling memoir of growing up blind and climbing toward the world’s Seven Summits.
Presentations
- Keynote addresses and the No Barriers film — Keynote speaking and the documentary chronicling his expeditions and the No Barriers movement.
Peter White
A BBC broadcaster and the corporation’s disability affairs correspondent.
Profiles:
Presentations
- In Touch — Presents BBC Radio 4’s long-running programme for blind and partially sighted listeners.
Quinton Williams
A totally blind developer who learned Swift by building real projects with AI tools such as Claude Code, studying the code as he goes, and published his first app in 2026.
Profiles:
Apps
- VAL: Voice, Alarm & Chimes — A customizable talking and chiming clock for iPhone and Mac, compatible with Steve’s Talking Clock files, with alarms scheduled through Apple’s AlarmKit so they get through Focus and silent mode; a paid app chosen as AppleVis AnonyMouse’s App Pick of the Month for May 2026.
Kristen Witucki
A novelist and teacher of blind students.
Profiles:
Books
- Outside Myself (2018) — A novel in two voices about a blind teenage girl and an older blind man who meet through a library for the blind.
- The Transcriber (2013) — A short novel narrated by the younger brother of a blind girl.
David Woodbridge
A blind Australian assistive-technology specialist and broadcaster; a Humanware braille product specialist and longtime Vision Australia technology presenter.
Profiles:
Presentations
- iSee — Using Various Technologies from a Blind Person’s Perspective (2012) — His long-running, roughly twice-weekly podcast reviewing mainstream and assistive technology — Apple devices in particular — from a blind user’s perspective.
Conclusion
Read together, the 125 entries make one point plainly: blind and low-vision people are producing finished, publicly available work — books you can buy, software you can install, and series you can subscribe to — not prototypes or promises. Every item here was included only after a working link to the actual work could be confirmed, so the directory doubles as a set of live starting points rather than a list of names.
The 14 people who appear in more than one category are worth noticing. The lines between author, developer, and presenter are thin: someone who builds a screen-reader tool often documents it in a book and demonstrates it on a podcast. Assistive technology in particular runs through all three categories at once, as subject, as tool, and as the thing being taught.
The directory is deliberately bounded. It covers English-language work, it counts sole-authored books rather than collaborations, it counts apps with recent development activity rather than abandoned ones, and it counts presenters who lead in their own right. Those limits mean many worthy creators fall outside any single edition; the boundaries are meant to keep each entry verifiable, not to mark the edge of what blind people create.
For the fuller treatment of any one field — additional works, appendices grouping books, apps, and media by type — see the companion directories: Blind Authors, Blind Developers, and Blind Presenters. For every qualifying app or book, see Blind Apps and Blind Books.