Why I built fathom
The phone in your pocket can see in the dark.
It can read a street sign from half a block away.
It can map a room in 3D while you walk through it.
It can run AI on the phone itself, with no internet connection.
Most people use it to scroll.
Accessibility always arrives second.
It has always worked this way. Cameras got good for selfies years before anyone pointed one at a menu for a blind reader. Every leap in consumer hardware reaches us late, and only partway.
I’ve watched this my whole life. I’m visually impaired.
- As a kid A video magnifier that put my textbooks, worksheets and mail on a TV screen, huge. Too big to leave the room.
- Then A portable version, portable in name only. It was heavy.
- Early ’90s ZoomText, software that enlarges everything on screen, on a DOS laptop.
- Later Magnifiers and screen readers on Windows. Each step helped. Each one was hard to learn.
- The smartphone A screen reader and magnifier built into every phone, out of the box. A real leap.
Then it stopped.
Good enough became the ceiling.
Blind and low vision people still get a watered-down version of the apps everyone else uses. Even apps built for accessibility run on older technology and settle for good enough.
Catch up now. Keep pace from here.
Accessibility doesn’t have to wait its turn anymore. The tech built to entertain everyone else is already in your pocket, and it can do far more.
- Built for
- Sharpening a selfie
- Pointed at
- Reading a menu
- Built for
- Brightening a night photo
- Pointed at
- Finding a curb
- Built for
- Previewing a couch in your living room
- Pointed at
- Mapping a hallway
- Built for
- Captioning your photos
- Pointed at
- Describing a street
Point that tech at the right problems and accessibility catches up fast.
Then it has to keep up. AI gets better every few months. Accessibility tools should too, at the same speed, not a decade behind.
That’s why I built fathom.
Built with the people who use it.
fathom started as an experiment. Now blind people shape it.
It was tested in Delaware and Minneapolis, with friends from the National Federation of the Blind. Feedback now comes in through the app from across the US and Europe. People tell us what breaks, and that decides what we build next.
The goal: a visual assistant, built for blind people, in the hands of every blind person.
Your hands are already full.
A white cane in one hand. A guide dog’s harness in the other. Nobody needs another device to hold.
fathom’s future is hands-free: a camera you wear, like a pair of glasses, that keeps what it sees private and doesn’t draw attention.
We’re testing it now on smart glasses from XREAL and devices running Google’s Android XR, and bringing fathom to Android phones. fathom won’t lock you into one device. You pick the glasses that fit your life, and fathom gets better as the hardware does.
That’s the next summit.