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Talking to Léonie Watson about computer vision and blindness

I recently had the pleasure of talking to Léonie Watson for a section on the rehab Tech Talks podcast which I co-present for the company I work for. Léonie works with The Paciello Group on web standards accessibility, and I’ve met her on a handful of occasions through conferences that she attends and speaks at. She is also completely blind, having lost her sight as an adult due to complications of diabetes (I highly recommend her personal account of how it happened, Losing Sight).

As our podcast topic was computer vision—extracting semantic data from photos and video using machine learning—I was keen to find out how this could help people with impaired vision. I was absolutely amazed and delighted by what I learned, and I wanted to share this extract from our conversation.