When my sight began to slip away, I feared losing so many things I love. After all, so much of our daily lives revolves around the ability to connect on a visual level.

My first love has always been technology and just as touch screens were becoming common place, I was unable to see them. How could I possibly interact with technology that was so heavily visual? There wasn’t even any tactility to the screen, it was a perfect smooth piece of glass. No raised buttons to identify what I was pressing, no way to memorise an elaborate process of taps and clicks – I felt lost. Lost but not defeated; I clung steadfast to the belief that there must be a way to adapt this to make it work to my benefit.

There was an unforeseen advantage- and as a result an adaptability – to this. The migration to touch screen forced the industry to reimagine how we would interact with these devices. The result was Apple developing VoiceOver for the iPhone, a gesture based screen reader. I didn’t realise it at the time but this would be my entry point to making the world accessible.

Now that my phone was equipped with the ability to read on screen items aloud, the phone became indispensable. It would be my reading tool for university, with all the books converted to digital form and my phone now reading them aloud. It would also become my window to interacting with the world at large – Facebook, Twitter, email all made accessible through this fantastic interface. It even allowed me to help my kids with their homework. It would creep into every aspect of my life becoming more and more indispensable as the days wore on. The unforeseen disadvantage: battery anxiety. My phone was now an extension of me, filling in the gaps that my lack of sight had created.

With the constant creation of new and previously unthinkable technological advancements, I wonder whether my main assistive device will even be the phone? Looking ahead 5-10 years I foresee a transitional period in the mechanics of interacting with our technology. One that will see a move away from typing onto screens and move towards spoken language, with a natural migration to a screen-less (or at least screens as we know them now) future. I believe that this technology is just on the horizon and something I relish the thought of.