Meet Syed, One Engineer’s Blueprint for Life After Vision Loss

When Syed lost his vision in 2005 after being shot during a robbery in Atlanta, he had to rebuild his professional life from scratch. Two decades later, he holds a master’s degree in computer science and works as an accessibility engineer at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB). Technology has been central to that journey,  and he’s still pushing its boundaries.

Using Meta Glasses for What Phones Can’t Do

Syed recently used Be My Eyes’ volunteer call feature through Meta AI Glasses to configure a BIOS on a second-hand laptop, something completely inaccessible to screen readers, by definition. The glasses let him keep his hands free while a volunteer acted as his eyes, following his step-by-step technical instructions to navigate the BIOS menus.

His workflow: the AI feature on the glasses handles routine visual tasks (checking clothing colors, reading a frozen screen), while the volunteer call feature kicks in when he needs precision, real-time guidance. The glasses beat the phone for one key reason, no hands required!

How He Lost His Vision — and Got Back to Work

The incident on May 31, 2005 left Syed with one eye surgically removed and the other with a severely damaged optic nerve. After months of depression and physical rehabilitation, he made a decision: he wasn’t going to stop. He contacted the Helen Keller Center in Brooklyn, learned braille and independent travel, passed his GED on the first attempt, and enrolled in a computer science program in the early 2010s, when digital accessibility was still an afterthought in most classrooms.

He took calculus, linear algebra, and programming courses at a time when professors had no framework for supporting a blind student. His solution was methodical: he showed up to office hours, asked professors to read what they wrote on the board, requested materials one day in advance, and recorded lectures. Not every professor cooperated immediately, but most came around.

The Knowledge Gap Is the Real Problem

Syed is direct about this: accessibility isn’t primarily a money problem or a time problem. It’s a knowledge problem. Developers and designers who understand accessibility from the start of a project don’t need to retrofit it later. The cost is negligible. The impact is not.

At AFB, he now helps run a digital accessibility internship, training early-career technologists to build with accessibility in mind from day one. His own experience of educating professors, tutors, and colleagues throughout his academic career informs how he approaches that work. He was filling a knowledge gap then. He’s filling the same gap now, at scale.

The same principle applies to AI tools. Knowing how to ask precise questions (of a professor, a volunteer, or an AI model) is a skill that transfers across contexts. Self-advocacy and effective prompting are, functionally, the same thing.

Watch the full interview on the Be My Eyes YouTube channel for Syed’s complete story, including his path from Pakistan to New Jersey, his experience in the Be My Eyes beta program, and his thoughts on what blind professionals need from the technology industry.