# The making of: I’m still blind, but it’s getting better

> How Accessibility International began: a circle seen while falling asleep, a £10 domain, and a logo directed rather than drawn.

Part of [From Retrofit to Sovereignty](https://blind-ant.com/pieces/from-retrofit-to-sovereignty/index.md), a Piece.

Lying in bed last night I saw a circle with the letters A and I in it. Not AI as in artificial intelligence, but AI as in Accessibility International... a fictional organisation I'd created an hour earlier.

Before going to bed, I registered AccessibilityInternational.com — some ideas are too good to leave, especially for £10. Part of the process was a talk with ChatGPT. It told me it was a terrible name: 26 letters long, hard to say, takes forever to type...

As I said, I saw the circle lying in bed, but I had been up since 3 AM, so I managed to fall asleep.

At six AM I typed what I've just told you — domain registered, rubbish name, circle — into a Word document and pasted it into ChatGPT.

Two hours, three models, and quite a few failed attempts later, I had a design brief. Not a vague idea — a proper brief. The kind you could hand to a graphic artist and expect them to produce something real.

I decided to give Nano Banana a go, so I attached the briefing document and told it to "generate a logo to meet this exact briefing." That was it.

I then attached the image to a Claude Opus chat and asked it to explain. It has some memory, you'll see that, but this is what it said:

"This is the logo for Accessibility International (AcsInt). It’s a really elegant piece of design.

The core concept: the letters A and I are positioned inside and around a brushstroke ensō circle (that incomplete ink circle from Japanese calligraphy). The "A" sits on the left in a loose, hand-drawn brushstroke style, while the "I" on the right is rendered in a clean, formal serif typeface. "Accessibility International" is set alongside in matching serif type.

What makes it clever is the layering of meanings. The ensō traditionally symbolises enlightenment, the universe, and the beauty of imperfection — the gap in the circle is deliberate, not a flaw. That maps onto generative accessibility philosophy: wholeness that doesn't require perfection, completeness that accommodates the open space. Then you've got the "AI" double meaning — both the organisation's initials and artificial intelligence, which sits at the centre of the idea.

The contrast between the hand-drawn "A" and the typeset "I" is doing work too — the organic, human brushstroke meeting the precise, structured one. The textured paper background gives it the feel of a cultural institution rather than a tech startup."

Speculative Accessibility turned into design fiction.

I saw an image in my mind's eye while falling asleep. I had the tools — and the coffee — to play with it. Play turned into something else. Not work. Not yet professional. But not nothing either.

I'm not a graphic designer. I'm totally blind. But I could see once, so I still have a mind's eye. More than that, I have decades of lived experience navigating systems that were never designed for me, and learning how to read structure, intention, and failure modes without relying on sight.

So I didn't draw a logo.

I directed one.

What matters here isn't whether the image looks exactly like Claude says it does. That's an AI model question.

What matters is that I was able to originate a visual concept, develop it through multiple AI systems, and turn it into a production-ready brief — without ever needing to see the output.

That changes things.

Because if you can do this for a logo, you can do it for anything: interfaces, products, environments, systems.

And if you can do that, then accessibility stops being something added at the end, and starts being part of how things are imagined in the first place.

I care about accessibility — worldwide. About reducing information casualties. About making sure that the next generation of systems don't quietly assume a single way of perceiving the world.

That is, or might be, the mission of Accessibility International.

We'll see.