iPhone for the blind. Stirring description by a blind person about the power of accessible media. My favorite part is his realization that, with an app called Color Identifier his iPhone can *tell* him verbally what colors he’s “seeing.” However, he mistakenly tries it for the first time in the dark:

I have never experienced this before in my life. I can see some light and color, but just in blurs, and objects don’t really have a color, just light sources. When I first tried it at three o’clock in the morning, I couldn’t figure out why it just reported black. After realizing that the screen curtain also disables the camera, I turned it off, but it still have very dark colors. Then I remembered that you actually need light to see, and it probably couldn’t see much at night. I thought about light sources, and my interview I did for Get Lamp.First, I saw one of my beautiful salt lamps in its various shades of orange, another with its pink and rose colors, and the third kind in glowing pink and red.. I felt stunned.

Inspires me to think much more about Universal Design and the importance of general accessibility. It’s also powerful to think about what technology can do to make the invisible visible for anyone in simple ways.
(via Daring Fireball.)