Andrew Leland

My sister @nicolaflorimbi has a solo show of brilliant paintings at @corbettvsdempsey ! The opening was on Thursday and it was a smashing success — she’s already sold two paintings in two days, with more sure to come. The gallery was *buzzing* with visitors both times we visited. I feel confident I’d say this even if she wasn’t my sister: the paintings are masterful, beautiful, brilliant, and can absorb hours of study: they’re dense with detail, hidden treasures, weird secret grottoes, deep-cut art-historical references (and, if you happen to share a mother with her, references to objects we grew up with). The compositions and scenes she describes in acrylic on these huge canvases are shocking, mysterious, inviting, troubling, delightful, demanding; in a word: fucking awesome. I couldn’t be prouder of her. If you’re in Chicago, the show is up through June 13 and you would be very foolish to miss it!!!! 📸: @lilgameshhh

Ancient Macintoshes and a relic from @fencetagram at the NY State Writers Institute at SUNY Albany

"I ​don't ​want ​people ​to ​hear ​this ​and ​think, ​like, ​oh ​cool, ​AI ​solved ​accessibility ​then," says @quailty . "So for ​my ​next ​product, ​we ​don't ​need ​to ​think ​about ​it." On the latest Aboard Podcast, a discussion about the limits of tech accessibility at scale—and how AI tools can give blind and other disabled users the flexibility they need. Check out the whole conversation via the link in our bio!

"The big tech giants have blind developers and disabled developers and they have accessibility initiatives," says @quailty , "but it's always going to be that sort of side door thing." On the latest Aboard Podcast, Andrew talks about how vibe-coding tools like Claude Code are helping disabled people create software solutions that suit their specific accessibility needs. Check out the whole conversation via the link in our bio!

“The blind vibe-coding revolution is upon us.” On this week’s podcast, @ftrain2000 and @zlayde are joined by @quailty to discuss how blind and low-vision people are using AI tools to create and adapt software to suit their accessibility needs. With limits to what any out-of-the-box software or device might do, is AI the way to give disabled people technological solutions that really work? Listen now via the link in our bio!

Things I'm thinking about today, the day that _The Country of the Blind_ is out in paperback: 1. I got COVID two weeks ago and I'm still spending large parts of the day in bed. Too foggy to come up with a smart observation about the disconnect between different disability communities, e.g. the ease with which some people (including me) can get real strident about one kind of access (alt text, say, or digital accessibility more broadly) while simultaneously demonstrating vigorous disregard for immunocompromised folks with cavalier masking practices. I am implicating myself, here, between bouts of scarfing copious turmeric root. It's too soon for me to say I have long COVID, but this is also way longer than I've ever had symptoms, and the symptoms are weirder. I have medium COVID. 2. I am really proud of the silver Pulitzer Finalist disc that's on the paperback, as well as all the fun blurbs from fancy organs. I worked hard on the book but also all of that feels like a meteor-hit of luck more than anything else. The success of a book depends on so much beyond the actual merits of a book. I say this not to fish for additional praise in the comments ( why not redirect your kindness to esims for gaza? /project/crips-for-esims-for-gaza), but rather just to point out that I have worked with writers and books for long enough to know that merit and accolades have a more correlative than causal relationship (if this sentence doesn't make sense, please see previous item re brain-fog and "medium covid"). (more in comments, I guess, IG cut me off.)

Since its release in February, a lot of people (including, e.g., @kevinroose this past Tuesday) have wondered what (and who) the Vision Pro — Apple’s swanky new mixed-reality headset — is for. For @nymag , I found an answer!

Congratulations to Texas Book Festival alumni Tracy Daugherty, Andrew Leland (@quailty ), and Ed Park (@tharealedpark ) for the prestigious honor of being named as 2024 Pulitzer Prize finalists. We’re so proud of you! 💫 Congratulations to all of this year’s finalists and winners. Thank you for your contributions to the world of arts and letters. 📖 For more: @pulitzerprizes #pulitzer #pulitzerprize

Hi from chicago. Alt text was hard to write for this one

Saw that the @queensmuseum was offering free #braille catalogs (to blind and low vision folks) of the @emilielouisegossiaux exhibition (that is CURRENTLY ON VIEW) and requested one on a lark. Even though it’s infinitely less convenient for me to read in this form considering my still glacially slow braille reading speed compared with how fast I’d read it with a screen reader (or tired eyes + magnification), it still felt like a revelation sitting here at the kitchen counter silently reading some new text that I’m interested in. Inclusion is a terribly dorky word, but … I felt included! I got to read the brochure just like anyone else would, without any fancy techno-interventions or special accommodations or self-advocacy. Which I can say, having experienced the work and now having read this text, is entirely in the spirit of this wonderful exhibition itself.

The last time I went for a run was probably a decade ago. We were still living in mid-Missouri, Oscar was a baby, and we lived a few blocks from a long, straight, wide trail that felt pretty safe to run on. The previous year I’d retired from biking, even on the trail, after a few close calls, where I didn’t see a kid playing in the brush off to the side of the trail until I was whizzing by them, their innocent faces inches away from my spokes. I never had a close-call moment with running, it just didn’t feel good anymore—too much constant anxiety about tripping on a rock or colliding with another jogger or crushing a toddler or a turtle (lotta turtles on that trail). But now Oscar is 11 and interested in running. There is a local 5K that raises money for Safe Passage, a nonprofit that offers free support to survivors of domestic violence (and their children). Oscar says he’s psyched about being my guide so we’re gonna run the 5K Hot Chocolate Run in December. (If you want to support us [and Safe Passage], I’ll link to our fundraiser page below.) A friend with RP who’s done many such runs with his daughter told me about these bibs, which I wasn’t going to wear until race day, but Oscar really wanted to break them in on our training run this past Sunday. I was surprised by how much shame I felt, running through town with a bib that says BLIND in maximally legible letters. It was like using the cane for the first time all over again—fraudulence and withering embarrassment. But I ran through the shame and remembered how good running is at helping you metabolize whatever ugly feelings might be afoot—it’s hard for any such superficial anxieties to survive more than a mile or two. And it’s a delight to see Oscar’s athleticism—he’s traditionally been way more interested in complex post-Catan board games and D&D than “soccer” and the like, but he seems to get out of running what I do. I think we’re both feeling a lot of elation on these training runs. And I’m learning more in 2.5 miles about what he’s thinking about and doing these days than I ever would trying to ask him at home. Wish us luck on December 3!!!!

Amazingly full and fun few days in nyc culminating in a conversation with @gideonlk who took time out of an epic week of closing TWO (2) white-hot priors-renovating pieces in @newyorkermag (data fraud! SBF! Run don’t walk!) to chat with me at @nyu_journalism about blindness and reporting. (📸: @roseolm ). Also had a lovely time (but failed to gather any images from) visits to @eugenelang and @chloecooperjones ’s hot new perch at @columbiaschoolofthearts . New and old friends! Good and mediocre food! Central Park on a sunny afternoon felt like I’d been warped into my fictional @sesamestreet childhood. Who else can I tag, @taylorswift et al heyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy