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Joshua Miele: Hands-On Mapping: The Story of a Blind Cartographer

Event Details:

Friday, April 23, 2021
3:15pm - 4:45pm PDT
Joshua Miele

Dr. Joshua Miele is a blind scientist, inventor, and community leader with decades of experience creating innovative accessibility solutions. In addition to tactile cartography, he has made contributions to mobile wayfinding tools, video description technologies, and accessible STEM education. He is currently a Principal Accessibility Researcher at Amazon and lives in Berkeley, California.

Date and Time: April 23, 2021 3:15pm to 4:45pm

RSVP for this event

On the event of the fifth anniversary of the David Rumsey Map Center, please join us for a talk by special guest Dr. Joshua Miele who will talk about his story as a blind cartographer. Joshua will use the creation of TMAP – Tactile Maps Automated Production – to frame the broader landscape of how tactile maps and graphics can be used by blind people to understand many kinds of spatial information. He will discuss the power of touch as a spatial percept, as well as the design constraints on tactile representations that are surprising and challenging to most visual designers. Key topics include historical techniques for creating tactile maps, examples and counterexamples of tactile map use cases, and promising technologies for expanding the availability of accessible maps in the future. As we have been doing with many of our events this academic year, we are designing a keepsake to go with the talk and the anniversary celebration. The first 150 that register and attend the talk will receive the keepsake in the mail.

The talk will take place Friday, April 23, 2021 on Zoom and follows the schedule below:

3:00pm PDT: Zoom opens

3:15pm PDT: Talk by Joshua Miele, followed by Q&A.

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