Building for
real independence.

I began to understand accessibility through the experience of people who face these problems every day. Product manager Rui Zheng and app developer Guangrong Shen are both visually impaired. Learning alongside them gave me a perspective I had never had before.

I had taken many small actions for granted: reading a label, finding an entrance, checking where I was. The internship made me think about what each of those actions involves when someone cannot rely on sight—and how a useful tool could make everyday life more independent.

I also spoke with founder Wu Yi. Seeing this work from both the product and engineering sides helped me appreciate the value of responding to a real need.

I learned to pay attention to the way a person actually uses a product. Rui and Guangrong brought their lived experience into their work, showing me how accessibility shapes product decisions and implementation.

THE COLLEAGUES I LEARNED ALONGSIDE

Portraits from the supplied team exhibition material.

These details helped me see that a feature becomes useful through the whole experience: how someone finds it, understands its feedback and uses it in the world around them.

One of my most important lessons was how closely mobility connects to quality of life. Being able to leave home and reach a workplace can open up opportunities for work, income, social contact and a more independent daily routine.

In our conversations, I learned about the barriers people encounter when using a white cane and tactile paving: routes can be incomplete, and a path intended to provide guidance may be blocked by parked vehicles or other obstacles. That made accessibility feel like a question about the whole journey.

Guide dogs can make an enormous difference, but availability is limited. A May 2026 China News Service report described around 400 working guide dogs in China and cited approximately 17.31 million visually impaired people.

Reported in May 2026. These figures show the scale of limited availability; individual mobility needs and eligibility vary.

Guide dogs also need extensive training and eventually retire. Continuity of support matters: a person’s daily journeys continue when a working partnership ends. Guide Dogs’ retirement guidance describes the transition and the support involved.

Developments in multimodal AI, wearable computing and robotics made me think about a different kind of mobility assistance: a phone working with smart glasses and, eventually, a guide robot. Could these technologies help make support available to more people?

Apple Vision Pro gave me a reference point for the possibilities of spatial computing. Lightweight smart glasses would be a different form factor to explore. The idea of combining perception, spoken feedback and physical guidance became an engineering direction I wanted to understand.

This is a longer-term possibility. Reliable perception, useful feedback and behaviour in complex streets would all need careful development with users. A 2024 study of guide-dog handlers and trainers reinforced the importance of understanding their needs when designing guide robots.

With the team’s guidance, I used Claude Code to learn how to build a simplified version of Douya Vision in one week. We began with a phone as the computing device and focused on getting a basic version working.

The experience connected coding to a purpose I could understand. The people I was learning from helped me see why the work mattered, while the agent helped me take a first step towards implementing it.

The App Store link on this page is the team’s published product. My work during the internship was a simplified learning prototype. That distinction is part of what I learned: a first version is a beginning, and a useful product grows through experience, iteration and listening to its users.

I came away with a deeper appreciation of engineering. Helping solve even part of a real problem can change what is possible in someone’s daily life. I want to keep learning how to do that well.

This strengthened the direction I found at MIT Media Lab and continue to explore through my music accessibility projects: using modern technology to help people with disabilities enjoy a fuller life.