Newsletter No. 361

New independent research by software company nuom has revealed growing concern among disabled people that the rise of AI in healthcare could lead to exclusion for those less confident with technology. nuom’s study, ‘AI in Healthcare: Why Public Trust Remains the Critical Missing Ingredient’, shows that while people increasingly embrace technology for health management, they remain deeply sceptical about AI-powered healthcare solutions specifically.

The HealthTech consultancy commissioned an independent survey of 2,000 UK adults, revealing that nearly two-thirds of respondents with a physical or mental disability believe the development of AI in healthcare could result in speed and efficiency being prioritised over the personal, human support that some patients rely on.

Read the full story here: Survey finds disabled people would trust AI tools if implemented with accessibility in mind

What is the role of artificial intelligence in supporting blind and vision impaired people in the workplace? – A recent Westminster event brought together VI leaders, the technology sector, and politicians to discuss what can deliver a step change in getting people with vision impairments (VI) and those who are blind into employment. However, to be successful going forward, vision-impaired leaders, the sector, and government will need to work together.

Under the banner of Vis-Ability, an event hosted by Marsha de Cordova MP and Fight for Sight, brought together over 140 influential leaders and allies to discuss how blind and vision-impaired people can make the most of artificial intelligence (AI).

‘While we now have the technology we need, it’s clear that barriers remain. It’s essential that the public sector, private providers, and advocacy groups work together and in partnership with individuals living with vision loss to overcome these barriers and create meaningful change.’

Read the full story here: What is the potential of AI for blind and vision impaired people?

Clinical scientists and their teams are helping to push patient recruitment ahead within a clinical trial that could help prevent blindness from bleeding as a complication of wet age-related macular degeneration (AMD).

Fight for Sight recognises and wants to highlight the important role both the clinical teams and the patients who participate in research play in the success of a trial. Clinical trials are one of the last stepping stones to direct patient benefit and TIGER aims to be the largest trial to date comparing treatments for haemorrhages related to wet AMD.

Read the full story here: Site success in discovering patients to take part in a clinical trial for age-related macular degeneration

Cataracts, pink eye and other ocular disorders are linked to heat, air pollution and higher UV exposure.

For five months in 2017, farmworker Alka Kamble experienced blurred vision in one of her eyes but didn’t consult an ophthalmologist. “I couldn’t afford it, and neither did I have the time, as I had to work long hours to make ends meet,” she says. Then Kamble saw a flyer for a free eye check-up clinic near her home in Jambhali village, in India’s Maharashtra state. The doctor there suggested immediate cataract surgery and said that overexposure to solar radiation had likely contributed to her deteriorating eyesight.

A number of well-known factors, including exposure to UV radiation, genetics and aging can lead to cataracts, a condition affecting roughly 94 million people in which the lenses of the eyes get cloudy, causing blurry vision. But in recent years, researchers have found another causative factor for cataracts and other eye disorders: climate change.

Read the full story here: How climate change is damaging our vision

In late 2024 and early 2025, a major public consultation was held to inform the shaping of a new NHS 10 Year Plan for England, due to be published this June.

As part of the consultation, RNIB ran a series of workshops with blind and partially sighted people to hear experiences, hopes, concerns and recommendations to share with the team developing the coming plan.

In the workshops, blind and partially sighted people supported the three overarching changes proposed in the Government’s consultation: of moving care closer to communities, making better use of technology, and putting a greater focus on prevention of ill health. However, our participants raised concerns about being left behind if accessibility, usability and inclusion aren’t built in from the start.

Read the full article: The NHS 10-Year Health Plan: What do blind and partially sighted people want it to include?

Meta has just dropped a powerful set of open-source tools that could soon revolutionize how blind and low vision people interact with the world. While the headlines talk about perception, localization, and reasoning, what’s really happening is a quiet but extraordinary leap forward in machine intelligence – the kind that can see, understand, and explain the world to us in more human-like ways.

These tools include:

• Meta Perception Encoder: Giving AI Sharper, Smarter Eyes. This new vision model can recognize incredibly subtle details – think of spotting a goldfinch in the background, or a stingray hiding under the sea floor. When this encoder is embedded into tools like PiccyBot, Seeing AI, or smart glasses, it means better object detection, smarter scene descriptions, and clearer help from visual assistants. It could bridge the gap between what’s technically visible and what’s actually understandable – a crucial leap for blind users.
• Perception Language Model (PLM): Visual Reasoning That Thinks in Stories. PLM brings together vision and language with huge new datasets, including fine-grained video descriptions and visual Q&A. This could lead to AI that not only tells us what’s in a scene, but why it matters – capturing nuance, activity, and relationships in a way that feels intuitive and informative. Imagine an AI not just saying “a person is walking,” but “a child is skipping ahead of her mother on a beach, holding a red kite.”
• Meta Locate 3D: Voice-Powered Spatial Awareness. This one’s a game-changer. Say “where’s the vase near the TV,” and the system knows exactly which vase you mean — even if there’s another one on a table across the room. It maps real-world 3D environments using language. For blind users, this could unlock wearables or home assistants that offer true spatial awareness and object-finding power. It’s like giving verbal sight to our surroundings.
• Dynamic Byte Latent Transformer: Faster, Smarter Language. It’s technical, but here’s the takeaway: this new language architecture is faster, more robust, and doesn’t need traditional tokenizers. That could make future AI tools snappier and more reliable – whether reading a document aloud or answering a complex question.
• Collaborative Reasoner: Empathetic Agents That Learn Together. Perhaps the most exciting tool for education, employment, and everyday support. Meta is working on AI agents that can collaborate – not just give answers, but reason with us, support our thinking, and help us learn. These social agents might one day help blind students master math, prepare for job interviews, or troubleshoot tech – in a conversational, emotionally aware way.

Meta has open-sourced all this: the models, the code, and the data. That means researchers, developers, and accessibility startups can start experimenting now – not five years from now. For blind users, this could accelerate the arrival of truly intelligent assistants that don’t just describe the world but understand it with us.

If even one of these tools ends up inside our glasses, apps, or screen readers, it might mean a step closer to that dream many of us share – of AI giving us the confidence and clarity to move through the world like never before.

EastEnders is working with the Royal National Institute of Blind People on an upcoming story centred around Lauren and Peter’s newborn son.

Having struggled to settle baby Jimmy in recent weeks, Lauren becomes concerned by his lack of ability to focus as he struggles to latch during breastfeeding. Determined to follow her mother’s instinct, Lauren takes Jimmy to the hospital for further tests where the doctors confirm that Jimmy is severely sight impaired.
The storyline will follow Lauren and Peter as they attempt to navigate life with a newborn, the symptoms that Lauren picks up on which leads her to seek a diagnosis, and how the diagnosis will impact Jimmy and their family as a whole.

Speaking of the storyline, EastEnders Executive Producer Chris Clenshaw says: “It was imperative that we worked with RNIB and experts in the field when consulting on Jimmy’s visual impairment storyline to ensure it was portrayed sensitively and accurately. The story will continue to develop over time as we look to focus on how the diagnosis affects Lauren and Peter as parents, their family and later, the effects this will have on Jimmy.”

Read the full article: Eastenders set to air visual impairment storyline

Contributions or any suggestions for the bulletin can be sent to our Editor, Jackie Brown at: JackieBrown@STRIVEAbility2024.onmicrosoft.com