Air Travel: Experiences and Metaphors
It’s been a turbulent few days for public markets and for relations between Anthropic and the US Department of War. Flying through that turbulence, I had two very different airport accessibility experiences.
More issues
Mainstream commercial interest aligning with accessibility needs – double hurrah with extra chocolate on top
As AI agents increasingly use the web on our behalf, accessibility and commercial incentives may finally align. WebMCP could transform websites from pixel puzzles into structured tools — a quiet shift that could transform web accessibility for blind users.
Airports: A Special Circle in Dante's Inferno of Accessibility Hell
Airports are stressful for everyone, but for blind travellers they can become a labyrinth of broken processes, awkward rules, and misplaced “assistance.” A personal account of how accessibility often fails in physical spaces—and why better design still matters.
High Performance Tools Demand High Performance Drivers
AI coding tools have become astonishingly powerful in the past 3 months — but power without discipline is dangerous. As vibe coding spreads, the real differentiator isn't prompting skill but engineering judgement: specification, testing, and keeping garbage out of complex systems.
Social Networks For AI Agents; an interesting experiment, an early April Fool or the stuff of nightmares
A social network for AI agents sounds like a quirky experiment—until you look closely. Moltbook reveals how open-source agents, granted real access to our data, could turn curiosity, speed and convenience into serious personal, corporate and societal risk.
I ❤️ Raspberry Pi
“Doing sensible things is good. Inciting many other people to do sensible things is better” – Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi. Here are just 3 examples of that ethos in action last week.
'I am not a robot': Wilfully and pointlessly inaccessible by design
Captchas aimed to block bots from scraping sites and creating fake accounts. Now bots outperform humans at them, while legitimate agents make blocking pointless. Vision-impaired users suffer as collateral damage—but new techniques may fix this.
What is it like to be a bat, or a bot?
More musings on the tricky question of subjective experience and the impossibility of distinguishing mimickry from true consciousness.
Wake up and smell the coffee
Deep Mind co-founder and Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, raises big questions on UK national radio regarding AI consciousness, the future of work and more generally the two sided coin of AI’s rapid progress.
Looking back at 2025: A Blind Perspective on AI Progress
2025 saw big gains in LLMs, with smaller models now very capable. But human-level embodied AI is still years away and AGI likely a decade off. Assistive AI hasn’t progressed much yet, but I’m optimistic and excited to announce an Assistive AI hackathon at Entrepreneurs First on Jan 17.