A Blind Tech Consultant Finds His Calling
Back in 2005, Julian Vargas bought a Nokia 6620 from AT&T for about $100. The phone ran the Symbian operating system, and AT&T sent him a memory card loaded with TALKS software, which provided text-to-speech access to nearly all of the phone's features and functions—this at a time when most phones had only numeric keypads, except for expensive BlackBerrys and Palm Treos. The iPhone and Android didn't yet exist.
“Having that [Nokia] phone was a game-changer for me,” said Vargas, who has been legally blind his entire life. “That was something, to suddenly have a phone that spoke all kinds of things to me that I never had access to before, like my signal strength, my battery level...If I got a text message, it would read that message and, even more importantly, I could respond to the message.”
One of the best features for Vargas, and other blind users of those rudimentary Nokia smartphones, was that they could use the TALKS software to store numbers in a contact list. Until that point, Vargas had to memorize his contacts.
Smartphones have evolved by leaps and bounds since then. And Vargas, who is now 52 and lives in the San Fernando Valley near Los Angeles, has made something of a career out of training other blind people how to use smartphones, smart speakers, and all manner of digital technology—even microwave ovens.
Today, Vargas spends relatively little time on his computer. It’s mostly apps on his smartphones that get him through his day. He’s very keen on Microsoft’s Seeing AI app, which he describes as the Swiss Army knife of blind tools. It speaks text as soon as it appears in front of the smartphone’s camera, can read some handwritten text, and identifies different denominations of currency. Vargas also uses an app
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