Blind Tech Mage

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

A few years ago, blind users struggled just to figure out where a control lived on a page - top-left, buried in a sidebar, or three tab-stops past a broken landmark. JAWS 2026’s Page Explorer, paired with AI, can now describe an entire page’s layout in detail, in seconds. That’s not incremental improvement. That is the exact kind of threshold Clarke was talking about - things that were once impossible are suddenly ordinary.

When I started writing software in the early 2000s, IDEs had no real concept of a screen reader. JAWS and NVDA weren’t supported so much as tolerated — you learned to work around your tools, not with them. Twenty years later, VSCode ships an accessible view built specifically for output like mine, no workaround required. That gap didn’t close on its own. It closed because a few engineers followed simple rules — real structure, real landmarks, real semantics — instead of bolting accessibility on after the fact. You can see that same approach at work in my projects.

Page Explorer and VSCode’s accessible view are both, at their core, AI describing an interface to me. The next step is AI that doesn’t just describe an interface — it acts on one, and coordinates with other AI to do it. That’s the question behind the research I’m doing now: how agents behave, and misbehave, when several of them have to work together. You can follow that work on my research page.