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How I AIHow a visually impaired engineer builds personal software with Claude Code + Wispr Flow
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WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Vision loss inspires AI-powered micro-apps that supercharge accessible coding
- Joe McCormick, a principal software engineer at Babylist who lost most of his central vision from Leber’s hereditary optic neuropathy, shows how multimodal AI has made work and daily life dramatically easier.
- He demos micro Chrome extensions that add instant image descriptions and one-keystroke spellchecking inside Slack (in the browser), emphasizing speed, keyboard shortcuts, and screen-reader accessibility.
- Joe then live-builds a new Slack-focused extension with Claude Code: a shortcut that extracts links from a message, summarizes the linked article via OpenAI, and displays 3–5 takeaways in an accessible modal.
- The conversation highlights “personal software” ROI (minutes saved daily for ~30 minutes of build time), practical agent tooling tweaks for accessibility, and the emotional impact of AI enabling him to read books with his kids via Gemini Live sharing.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasAI shrinks the accessibility gap in software engineering.
Joe describes how generative AI tools help visually impaired engineers close day-to-day productivity differences with sighted peers, both in coding and in parsing information-heavy workflows.
Micro-tools beat “Swiss Army knife” browsers when latency matters.
AI-native browsers can be powerful but slower; Joe prefers targeted Chrome extensions triggered by shortcuts for specific, repeatable tasks where seconds of friction add up.
Running Slack in Chrome unlocks rapid, customizable automation.
Instead of fighting the desktop app, Joe uses Slack Web so browser extensions can intercept focused messages and inputs, enabling seamless in-context assistance.
Keyboard-first UX is an accessibility and efficiency multiplier.
His tools revolve around consistent shortcuts (e.g., Ctrl+Shift+D/S/1) and screen-reader announcements (“Processing… complete”), minimizing navigation overhead and cognitive load.
Personal software ROI has collapsed—build time now justifies tiny wins.
He contrasts old tradeoffs (3 days to save 3 minutes/day) with current ones (30 minutes to save 3 minutes/day), making it rational to automate “small” annoyances.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesThe world is a whole lot easier.
— Joe McCormick
It was probably 25 minutes of a Claude Code session.
— Joe McCormick
The payback period has just become insane for a lot of this tooling.
— Joe McCormick
Latency is the killer feature.
— Claire Vo
‘Sorry, I can’t,’ becomes, ‘Sorry, I can,’ with the assistance of so many different tools now.
— Joe McCormick
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