Blind people shaping the future of smart glasses, Muse from meta, and listener feedback

SPEAKER_1 (0:01)

Live the life you want.

Jonathan Mosen (0:13)

Welcome to Access On, the technology podcast of the National Federation of the Blind. National Federation of the Blind President Mark Riccobono encourages a conversation about smart glasses. Muse is a new, agentic AI tool for meta that's gone viral. What can you do with it? Listeners share their perspectives on the pros and cons of iOS versus Android. And several relatively new apps that might add value to your daily computing experience.

It's Jonathan Mosen at the Jernigan Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, welcoming you to episode 96 of the podcast. First, today, as we've covered on previous episodes of Access On, we are aware of the increasing smart glasses backlash, the call for banning smart glasses, and the increasing use of pejorative rhetoric to describe the glasses and the people who wear them. Equally, there is increasing concern about the way that smart glasses are being portrayed as some sort of miracle cure or necessity for blind people. So it's a complicated issue.

Every month, the president of the National Federation of the Blind, Mark Riccobono, produces a presidential release, and this gets played at our chapter meetings around the country. The presidential release is a great way for President Riccobono to communicate about some of the issues that the federation is working on and thinking about. And certainly we are thinking about and working on the issue of smart glasses. Here is the relevant section on the subject from the October presidential release just released.

Mark Riccobono (1:50)

Federation members across the country have been encountering many intersecting issues related to artificial intelligence tools and the blind recently, especially as it relates to camera based devices like smart glasses. And I'm going to spend some time talking about smart glasses specifically.

Some people and certainly many of our members believe these to be valuable access tools while others are worried about privacy and the ability to record in certain settings. Both these concerns deserve a serious conversation, and I thought it would be good to discuss it here on this release since it is a hot topic in our community right now.

Now, the starting point for our federation is always our belief in blind people. We can learn how technology works. We can judge its value and effectiveness. We can use it responsibly, and we should use it responsibly. And most importantly, we should speak for ourselves as it relates to public conversations about tools and the safeguards that might need to go with them or regulations and the blind. Most importantly, we do not want the idea of others speaking for us on our behalf, especially as it relates to the technologies and services that might make a difference to us. And especially, we don't want to give our voice over to the companies and manufacturers of technology. That's a long-standing principle of the Federation. That's why we established our International Braille and Technology Center way back in 1990 In the regard of not being company specific, you'll hear me refer to smart glasses. Even though I know many Federation members own specifically Meta glasses. There are, of course, other players in this field and there will be many more. But oftentimes, people might refer to this as Meta glasses. But it's really not just about the company Meta and their product, it's about the general idea of wearable technologies, especially those with cameras. And so one philosophical point I want to make is that I encourage us in these discussions to talk about wearables or smart glasses generically rather than getting into the specifics or the appearance of specifics around one company or another. So for those of you who aren't familiar and for the rest of us, let's just stay grounded in smart glasses and why they're important. Well, smart glasses can certainly give a blind person hands-free access to visual information such as signs in the environment, product labels, other descriptions of unfamiliar surroundings. These are very helpful pieces of information to have. And the hands-free part is especially useful while traveling with a cane or guide dog. You know, all of us blind people often wish we had another hand available.

This is not unlike other tools that we've used previously, but the difference today is that these technologies, especially smart glasses, are less expensive, they're more portable, and they're built into devices which are not specifically built for blind people. So all sorts of people are buying them. We just happen to be leveraging them for our access needs. We need to remember that these devices are one tool, one tool among many that we may use. The independence that we have is within us, not in the devices we use. Philosophical point that bears saying again, the independence is within us, not within the tools that we use. Strong blindness, skills, training, self-confidence, relating to blindness continues to be as important as ever, even as we figure out what tools might help us achieve the kind of future we want in a particular situation.