Chris Maury's race to make the internet accessible for visually impaired
In the summer of 2010, Chris Maury was 24 years old and living the modern Silicon Valley dream.
He had dropped out of a PhD program in political science and moved to California to work in start-ups, with the aim of eventually starting his own company.
Mr Maury had near perfect vision, but as it started to degrade he visited his optometrist to get an updated prescription.
"When he was trying to fit the right prescription, my eyes just wouldn't focus," he told the ABC's new Control Z podcast.
Eventually he got the diagnosis — Mr Maury had Stargardt macular degeneration, a genetic disorder that affects one in 10,000 people.
The disorder affects the retina, the specialised light-sensitive tissue that lines the back of the eye.
Specifically, it affects a small area near the centre of the retina called the macula, which is responsible for sharp central vision.
Mr Maury said while he could not know for sure, based on the way his eyes were deteriorating, he had three to five years before he was legally blind.
"There definitely is a sense of running out of time," he said.
As his sight has degenerated, Mr Maury has become focused on ensuring he can remain active online even after he becomes legally blind.
"The scariest thing for me is not being able to keep up with the work that I'm doing and the conversation with the broader internet community," he said.
"So I've done everything I can to make sure that I can continue do that."
Parts of the blind community completely cut off
Before he started losing his vision, Mr Maury had no idea his company would be focused on improving blind people's access to the internet.
"I'm not sure I had even met a blind person until I found out that I was going blind," Mr Maury said.
He began by talking to seniors.
"Seniors more than anyone have the hardest time when they're losing their vision, not only because they have this lack of technology background, but the tools that do exist assume that you do," he said.
"It's hard enough for someone who's not used to technology to understand what email is, or what Facebook is, let alone trying to use these tools through this cumbersome software, like a screen reader."
Screen readers scan code and read it aloud to the user.
But Mr Maury said the readers could be such a hassle to use that some parts of the blind community did not even bother with them, leaving them completely cut off from the internet.
He said he wanted to make it easier for developers to design an audio-first experience, in which the user only heard what they needed to hear.
"We want to make it as easy for developers to build a conversational experience in their apps as it is for them to build a visual one," he said.
"For all the resources that exist to add buttons to a screen, or to quickly mock up a visual layout, there's nothing to build a conversational one."
'Imagine using any app without taking it out of your pocket'
One very famous conversational app is Siri, found on every Apple iPhone.
Siri is fairly intuitive — the user asks their phone to do something, and it does it — but it has limitations which Mr Maury hopes to improve.
"I want to be able to use any app that's on my iPhone without taking that phone out of my pocket and being able to do so conversationally with my voice," he said.
"And I don't think that's technically impractical. I think we can do that with the technologies that we have today. It's just putting them together in the right way."
Last year, in the first step towards achieving this dream, Mr Maury and his company created a voice enabled shopping app called SayShopping.
The user tells their phone what they are looking for, such as "I need coffee beans", and the app tells them what is available.
If the user wishes to buy the product, they just say "purchase" and the transaction is processed.
Mr Maury said as time went by and he lost more of his vision, he had been working harder to finish the huge list of jobs he felt needed to be done.
He runs accessibility meet-ups and advocacy groups, as well as a business, all as he adapts to a new way of experiencing the world.
And he said that rather than slowing him down, technology had only allowed him to work faster.
"I'm listening to news articles at 650 words per minute, I'm listening to podcasts at three times speed because over time I've been able to train myself to listen to that," Mr Maury said.
"And so where navigating websites has become more difficult, once I'm able to find sources and get them into an accessible format, which is easy through things like RSS, I'm actually able to consume more than I did before."
Control Z is a new ABC podcast by Yasmin Parry and Will Ockenden, dedicated to unravelling technology and internet culture. Download Control Z on iTunes or your favourite podcasting platform.