Here's What I've Been Doing. After Someone Gunned Me Down. And Left Me Completely Blind, Permanently.

[MarxMelencio]

Hi. It's good to be here! Looking forward to learn, share and collaborate on interesting projects!

I'm Marx. I'm an entrepreneur. A marketing communication strategist. A Deep Learning engineer. A disability advocate. A Machine Vision developer. A technical SEO campaign designer. A DIY robotics hobbyist. And I've been totally blind, for the past two decades.

To cut to the quick of it — Here's a brief video outlining the stuff I've been doing after that incident of senseless violence in 2003 (I was 23 then):
•

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIj1M6DWbTQ


And for those who want something to read — Here you go:

My Entrepreneurial Adventures
• A year after total blindness — I gradually built a digital marketing agency from a spare bedroom with dial-up Internet in Manila, starting as a freelance content writer working with independent Web affiliates and content publishers in North America, the EU and ASEANA.
• Barely a year after starting out — I found myself running a 100% remote operation in 2005, managing a team of 140 employees and contractors from all around the Philippines and in other areas in SE Asia.
• And right now, my wife and I are running a 19-year old multimedia marketing, multi-lingual telesales and AI engineering company — Here's a feature story in BBC about us: BBC World Service - Business Daily, The Blind Entrepreneur Building a Call Centre Empire

My Advocacy Work
• Right from business inception — We provided gainful employment opportunities to Filipino PWDs (persons with disability), which we found to be more accessible for them (myself included) because of mobility limitations.
• In 2006 — 80% of our remote and onsite workforce were persons with different mobility impairments.
• From that time up to present — I design and facilitate training workshops on assistive tech, remote employment, business development, ecommerce and digital marketing for PWDs, trying to help out and collaborate in any way that I can with local and international social organizations like Resources for the Blind (PH), Nippon Foundation (JP), ICEVI (EU), USAID and others.
• And our national government gave me the 2008 Most Inspiring Entrepreneur of the Philippines award — Here's my opinion piece in Rappler, a local multimedia news group that's run by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa: [OPINION] My life as a completely blind Filipino entrepreneur and tech developer

My Engineering Work
• In 2016 — I started creating wearable DIY electronics and AI technologies for deaf, blind and visually impaired persons, learning all about Deep Learning, Machine Learning, software programming, electronics and robotics on my own.
• A year thereafter — Our national government's Department of Science & Technology awarded me a 2-year R&D grant for a wearable prototype that I created for blind and visually impaired persons, while my wearable prototype for the deaf also won at an AIM university post graduate thesis competition along with R&D seed funding from a local VC group. Here's a BBC News feature story about this: 'Robbed of sight, I have a vision to help the blind see'
• After the same wearable prototype for blind and visually impaired persons won at international tournaments like Microsoft and Intel's Spatial 3D Competition — I'm now the chief Deep Learning engineer, Machine Vision developer and rapid prototyping specialist of a 5-year old biomed tech company in Sydney. We won as the Technology Company of the Year at last year's Australian Technologies Competition (ATC 2023) — Here's a feature story about our biomed tech company: Bionic glasses ‘seeing’ through sound

My Current Hybrid AI Engineering & Digital Marketing Projects
• Since 2022 — I've been developing hybrid generative AI and pro human workflow pipelines through open source LLMs (large language models), LVLMs (large vision language models) and my business resources, customizing and fine-tuning the entire tech and service stack for each business, target verticals, geos, relevant SEO, marketing and ideal audience profile data for optimum impact.

Thanks for your time!

 

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[cikatomo]

Hi, first thing first, you wrote a lot for the first post. What is the purpose? Are you introducing yourself or promoting your business?

Tell us how did you manage company of 140 people on day to day basis? Being visually impaired how did you read financial reports? Did somebody read, person or machine, or you had Braille version?

I am glad you are working on helping visually impaired.

 

[MarxMelencio]

cikatomo,

[SNIP]you wrote a lot for the first post. What is the purpose? Are you introducing yourself or promoting your business?[/SNIP]

Hi! Well I just followed what MJ said here, and I quote (relevant parts bolded for emphasis):

QUOTE:
#3: INTRODUCE YOURSELF
This is a close knit community free from the SCRIPTED gulag of cultural mediocrity. Please tell us your story. The more the better. A simple "Hello great to be here" (while nice) is generally ignored by the community. We want to hear where you've been, and where you're going.
/QUOTE

But I understand where you're coming from, as my story is about building a business that offers services which, when mentioning, may sound promotional. Though I wanted to share parts of my entrepreneurial experience that'd be relevant here to other members.

[SNIP]Tell us how did you manage company of 140 people on day to day basis? Being visually impaired how did you read financial reports? Did somebody read, person or machine, or you had Braille version?[/SNIP]

As I said, my operations way back in 2004 was 100% remote. And at that time, though there wasn't any mobile device that I could use as a blind user, there's something called a screenreader — It's a piece of software for MS Windows. It reads out all visible text in the focused application or in system-wide applets, including button labels, menu toolbar icon alt text,etc. It also offers quick ways for me to use and sequentially route the standard cursor, along with screenreader-provided virtual and invisible cursors, via keyboard shortcuts and direct keys, enabling me to interact with the elements of system and third party apps (often even with apps that have really bad accessibility design). Plus, it echoes back everything I type, so using global, application-specific and screenreader keyboard shortcuts is also quicker and, more importantly, quite straightforward.

JAWS for Windows from Freedom Scientific and good old MS Windows' built-in Narrator were the screenreaders that I used at that time. And I still use them up to this day.

Though fortunately, mobile and Linux managed to catch up with blind tech accessibility over the years. Now, I use VoiceOver in my iOS and Mac devices, Talkback (now called Google Accessibility Suite) in my Android devices, and Orca for my Linux machines, Raspberry Pis, various DIY electronic boards, etc. These are screenreaders.

So managing a workforce with hundreds of people is the same as how it's done today, even with thousands of employees and contractors — I have remote chats with clients and my managers, team leaders and head trainers (back then, we were using Yahoo Messenger, then Skype, and now, it's video meetings on Google Meet and Zoom), email correspondences, phone meetings, etc. I also use collaboration tools and platforms like Trello, Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Drive, Jira, Github, ClickUp and so on. All thanks to screenreaders!

But over the past couple of years, I feel more comfortable writing code to integrate with some online services from platforms that offer APIs. This makes it more accessible for me, as I'm the one designing 'em app UIs by doing this.

Same with reading digital documents like financial reports — Screenreaders to the rescue! And fortunately, being an AI engineer and software programmer early on allowed me to write code for converting visual charts, graphs and so on into digital spreadsheets before the time foundational LLMs and LVMs hit mainstream.

No, I don't read braille. I tried. But just couldn't. I can write in braille, though. However, being a bass player myself in a local hybrid funk-hardcore band (my bandmates back in college still get together sometimes for a quick jam over beers and whiskey), my calloused fingertips are preventing me from reading braille.

[SNIP]I am glad you are working on helping visually impaired.[/SNIP]

Among the few things that saved me from severe depression from the time I walked out of the hospital as a totally blind guy was immersing myself with other blind and visually impaired persons. And this pushed me to form a social organization that lobbied for assistive, accessible programs from the government for employment and business. After a few months, since nothing was happening at that front — I decided to build a business myself that provided gainful, accessible employment opportunities for other Filipino PWDs (not just blind and visually impaired, as I have a lot of friends locally and internationally in different disability sectors).

Up until today, I still do that though. For the past two decades, I've been our country's representative at disability affairs and human rights conferences by organizations like the ASEAN and United Nations, especially when it comes to tech accessibility, livelihood through ecommerce, remote employment, disability rights, etc.

Let me know if you have other questions. Always happy to share how things look like from my perspective, that of a blind Filipino entrepreneur and tech dev.

 

[Bekit]

Inspiring intro. Welcome to the forum!

 

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[cikatomo]

Welcome to the forum! I am not used to seeing such elaborate introductory posts so I was wondering what's it about.

I like how you explained all the tools you are using. Gives me perspective into the world I know very little about.

And are you saying you are using screen reader to type and format text like italics and bold? It's pretty amazing. I knew screen readers exists because making websites there's always talk about accessibility and how screen readers will read it, but never ever heard or saw the use first hand. It look pretty amazing what it can do.

And how do you code? Do you use the same screen reader? Is there a special IDE?

p.s. I just removed the whole block of quoted text because I wasn't sure if screen reader will read everything

 

[MarxMelencio]

Thanks, acikatomo!

Well, I use my screenreader to type this, and I just use the BB tags for italics and bolded text.

There aren't any special IDEs designed for blind users, at least not that I know of. What I use are standard IDEs that offer workable to decent accessibility with my screenreaders. But this often requires using different screenreaders (JAWS, Narrator and NVDA in Windows, Orca and SpeakUp in Linux, SSHing from Windows to Linux if those screenreaders fail), and routing different cursors (PC cursor and screenreader-provided cursors), which can get quite messy at times, until I figure it out and remember how it works on particular sections of IDEs (I'm looking at you, Android Studio).

Most often than not though, I tend to look for workarounds, i.e. Compiling code using CMake, instead of using tools like, you guessed it — Android Studio and MS Visual Studio, primarily because I feel limited when using these (there are some things I can't explore further because of screenreader inaccessibility issues).

And, there are dev tools that I haven't been able to find workarounds yet, such as Unity 3D, which I've been trying to use for the past couple of years now.

Cheers!

P.S. Quoted blocks of text here are read by my screenreader without issues.

 

[Bounce Back]

Software Eng here - I've done some wcag / a11y work and consult on it sometimes still. What I always instruct my team to do when we pick up these tickets is "close your eyes and actually use our app with a screenreader" - crazy how uncomfortable that makes people and you live it everyday.

Welcome to the forum. What would you say your biggest goal right now is?

 

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[Bekit]

P.S. Quoted blocks of text here are read by my screenreader without issues.

I think he was referring to the fact that when you "reply" to a post, it usually puts the entirety of that post into a quote block at the top, and it would likely be tedious for you to have to listen back through your entire post first before getting to what his reply said.

Not sure if you have an option to have your screenreader skip to the end of a section like that if you notice that it's something you don't want to listen to, but I interpreted it as a gesture to save you the trouble. :smiles:

 

[cikatomo]

I think he was referring to the fact that when you "reply" to a post, it usually puts the entirety of that post into a quote block at the top, and it would likely be tedious for you to have to listen back through your entire post first before getting to what his reply said.

Not sure if you have an option to have your screenreader skip to the end of a section like that if you notice that it's something you don't want to listen to, but I interpreted it as a gesture to save you the trouble. :smiles:

Yes that's exactly what I meant. Thanks for clarifying

 

[MarxMelencio]

Thanks, @Bekit and @cikatomo!
No issue skipping over blocks of text. There are straightforward keystrokes and gestures to do different things for this, i.e. Skip character, word, line, paragraph and screen. Plus, these are among the first things that blind users learn and frequently use when using desktop and mobile screenreaders.
I'd say many if not most of us are already familiar with these keystrokes and gestures, even beginner and intermediate users.
Cheers!

 

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[DoTheWork]

Thanks for sharing! Very inspiring and great for me to hear right now. I'm 24 and have been very sick and cognitively impaired since 2021 due to mold exposure and COVID and am not sure when I'll recover from this. It's been hard feeling so disadvantaged but this proves the possiblities!

 

[heavy_industry]

#gold

This should be a mandatory read for all the weaklings who like to complain about their perceived state of victimhood and the unfairness of life.

Do you think you are against all odds in your comfy house within the safe borders of a first-world country?

Imagine the challenges you would have to face in a violent, third-world country - while also lacking the ability to SEE, which most people take for GRANTED.

Thank you for sharing your story sir, and best of luck in your future endeavors.

 

[MarxMelencio]

@Bounce Back,

[SNIP]
Software Eng here - I've done some wcag / a11y work and consult on it sometimes still. What I always instruct my team to do when we pick up these tickets is "close your eyes and actually use our app with a screenreader" - crazy how uncomfortable that makes people and you live it everyday.
[/SNIP]

Yeah. It really takes getting used to at first. The rub there though is, for sighted devs, they can easily just open their eyes for the discomfort they feel to instantly go away.

Also, an effective alternative for sighted devs working on inclusive desktop UX design for screenreader users is, without using TTS, to place a cardboard with one horizontal line as a cutout, adjusting it as the cursor in use moves, and only interacting with it using the keyboard. That's what it's like for desktop screenreader users.

As for mobile, it's a similar concept. But The main difference is, it's a double tap on the touchscreen to activate an element (including characters in the virtual keyboard when typing).

[SNIP]
Welcome to the forum. What would you say your biggest goal right now is?
[/SNIP]

Thanks! Hmmm ... I'd have to segment that into three main parts, namely personal, business, and engineering.

Biggest personal goal this year is to acquire a property in CBD NSW Sydney.
For business, it's onboarding 100 clients before Q4 this year for our hybrid AI-and-proHuman pipeline for technical SEO.
Meanwhile, I'd say my biggest engineering goal right now is for our team at the Sydney-based biomed tech company that I mentioned in my OP to finish up a production version of our wearable prototype for blind and visually impaired persons, at least before our upcoming clinical trials, with the main requirement being it should be something that I'd be comfortable wearing all day outdoors in public (our target form factor's eyeglasses).

Cheers!

 

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[Black_Dragon43]

Hi. It's good to be here! Looking forward to learn, share and collaborate on interesting projects!

I'm Marx. I'm an entrepreneur. A marketing communication strategist. A Deep Learning engineer. A disability advocate. A Machine Vision developer. A technical SEO campaign designer. A DIY robotics hobbyist. And I've been totally blind, for the past two decades.

To cut to the quick of it — Here's a brief video outlining the stuff I've been doing after that incident of senseless violence in 2003 (I was 23 then):
•

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIj1M6DWbTQ


And for those who want something to read — Here you go:

My Entrepreneurial Adventures
• A year after total blindness — I gradually built a digital marketing agency from a spare bedroom with dial-up Internet in Manila, starting as a freelance content writer working with independent Web affiliates and content publishers in North America, the EU and ASEANA.
• Barely a year after starting out — I found myself running a 100% remote operation in 2005, managing a team of 140 employees and contractors from all around the Philippines and in other areas in SE Asia.
• And right now, my wife and I are running a 19-year old multimedia marketing, multi-lingual telesales and AI engineering company — Here's a feature story in BBC about us: BBC World Service - Business Daily, The Blind Entrepreneur Building a Call Centre Empire

My Advocacy Work
• Right from business inception — We provided gainful employment opportunities to Filipino PWDs (persons with disability), which we found to be more accessible for them (myself included) because of mobility limitations.
• In 2006 — 80% of our remote and onsite workforce were persons with different mobility impairments.
• From that time up to present — I design and facilitate training workshops on assistive tech, remote employment, business development, ecommerce and digital marketing for PWDs, trying to help out and collaborate in any way that I can with local and international social organizations like Resources for the Blind (PH), Nippon Foundation (JP), ICEVI (EU), USAID and others.
• And our national government gave me the 2008 Most Inspiring Entrepreneur of the Philippines award — Here's my opinion piece in Rappler, a local multimedia news group that's run by Nobel Peace Prize recipient Maria Ressa: [OPINION] My life as a completely blind Filipino entrepreneur and tech developer

My Engineering Work
• In 2016 — I started creating wearable DIY electronics and AI technologies for deaf, blind and visually impaired persons, learning all about Deep Learning, Machine Learning, software programming, electronics and robotics on my own.
• A year thereafter — Our national government's Department of Science & Technology awarded me a 2-year R&D grant for a wearable prototype that I created for blind and visually impaired persons, while my wearable prototype for the deaf also won at an AIM university post graduate thesis competition along with R&D seed funding from a local VC group. Here's a BBC News feature story about this: 'Robbed of sight, I have a vision to help the blind see'
• After the same wearable prototype for blind and visually impaired persons won at international tournaments like Microsoft and Intel's Spatial 3D Competition — I'm now the chief Deep Learning engineer, Machine Vision developer and rapid prototyping specialist of a 5-year old biomed tech company in Sydney. We won as the Technology Company of the Year at last year's Australian Technologies Competition (ATC 2023) — Here's a feature story about our biomed tech company: Bionic glasses ‘seeing’ through sound

My Current Hybrid AI Engineering & Digital Marketing Projects
• Since 2022 — I've been developing hybrid generative AI and pro human workflow pipelines through open source LLMs (large language models), LVLMs (large vision language models) and my business resources, customizing and fine-tuning the entire tech and service stack for each business, target verticals, geos, relevant SEO, marketing and ideal audience profile data for optimum impact.

Thanks for your time!

Wow this is super inspiring, you’ve achieved a ton. Massive congratulations, your story will help a ton of people here with their mindset.

I’m curious about two things. How did you overcome the trauma of being attacked and losing your sight? As a blind person were you not worried/fearful about the possibility of being attacked or mugged again?

 

[MarxMelencio]

Thanks, @Black_Dragon43!

[SNIP]
I’m curious about two things. How did you overcome the trauma of being attacked and losing your sight? As a blind person were you not worried/fearful about the possibility of being attacked or mugged again?
[/SNIP]

My wife and kid continue to give me the inspiration that sustains me each day. My entrepreneurial and engineering work continue to motivate me to better myself each day. Developing projects for and collaborating with other persons with disability along with advocates continue to give me the will to cope each day. Combined, this allows me to keep on trusting that there still is more good in the world.

But I still live with a dose of paranoia (sometimes unhealthy levels, though I'm often able to dial it down to just healthy suspicion). Each time I'm outdoors, especially when I'm with my wife (I was with my wife when I was attacked), my defenses are all up, and my senses, less eyesight, are all at a heightened state (similar to what I felt back then when driving an unfamiliar car at an unfamiliar place at night). So from that point to present, I regularly work out (strength training mainly, plus basketball dribbling exercises for agility and fast spatial perception), carry weapons legal for me to use outdoors like brass knuckles and a hybrid cane-taser (designed as a regular cane that blind people use), spar and train with my local MMA champ friend in Muay Thai and Jujitsu (street fighting and grappling techniques combined), and we keep weapons at home that my wife and kid are trained to use (since it isn't legal for blind persons to use 'em).

Cheers!

 

[Black_Dragon43]

My wife and kid continue to give me the inspiration that sustains me each day. My entrepreneurial and engineering work continue to motivate me to better myself each day. Developing projects for and collaborating with other persons with disability along with advocates continue to give me the will to cope each day. Combined, this allows me to keep on trusting that there still is more good in the world.

Family is huge for sure. Having people around you can trust and who can help you is really important for everyone.

But I still live with a dose of paranoia (sometimes unhealthy levels, though I'm often able to dial it down to just healthy suspicion). Each time I'm outdoors, especially when I'm with my wife (I was with my wife when I was attacked), my defenses are all up, and my senses, less eyesight, are all at a heightened state (similar to what I felt back then when driving an unfamiliar car at an unfamiliar place at night). So from that point to present, I regularly work out (strength training mainly, plus basketball dribbling exercises for agility and fast spatial perception), carry weapons legal for me to use outdoors like brass knuckles and a hybrid cane-taser (designed as a regular cane that blind people use), spar and train with my local MMA champ friend in Muay Thai and Jujitsu (street fighting and grappling techniques combined), and we keep weapons at home that my wife and kid are trained to use (since it isn't legal for blind persons to use 'em).

Damn this is fantastic, good on you brother. Love to see you're taking active steps to face up to it and maintain control over your life.

 

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