The legally blind scientist who built himself back into the produce aisle
New York, NY
Published August 25, 2026
A physician-scientist who's been legally blind since his teens got tired of being told to just use a delivery app, so he and his lab built the tools that let him shop, ride the subway, and find his way through a building on his own terms.
The story
The person and the place
Dr. John-Ross Rizzo is a physician-scientist at NYU Langone Health in New York City who has been legally blind since he was a teenager, from a condition called choroideremia.
The problem he cared about
people kept telling him to just use a grocery delivery app instead of shopping himself. "That doesn't support autonomy or agency," he said. "And I have to be honest with you, I like to pick my own damn produce."
The agency moment
rather than settle for the workaround, Rizzo turned his own lab's research, on AI mapping systems built for self-driving cars, toward the errands he was tired of outsourcing. Working with fellow researcher Dr. Giles Hamilton-Fletcher and the rest of the VMIL lab he directs, he built Shopscout, a wearable backpack that finds groceries on a shelf with its own camera, Commute Booster, an app that reads subway signs aloud, and Unav, an app that maps a building's inside without cell service.
What changed
Hamilton-Fletcher's team found that blind and low-vision travelers completed their subway journeys 33 percent faster using Commute Booster. A shopper finds a product on a shelf using Shopscout's own camera, instead of asking a stranger or a delivery algorithm to choose for them. The tools are moving from lab prototypes toward wider use, including future hospital and senior-care settings.
The move worth copying
Rizzo didn't start by asking what accessibility technology should look like in the abstract. He started with the specific errand that was still hard for him that week, built it with the people who live the same problem, and let his lab test whether it worked for them too. Know someone stuck working around a problem that could just be solved? Feed the scout at goodinprogress.org.
"I like to pick my own damn produce." — Dr. John-Ross Rizzo, CBS New York
Verified sources
Sources
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Sources last verified August 25, 2026.