Daniel Kish: The Blind Man Who Uses Echolocation

Daniel Kish is an American who has been blind since he was 13 months old and gets around by clicking his tongue and listening to the echoes, a skill called echolocation. In 2000 he founded World Access for the Blind to teach it to other blind people, and in 2015 he gave a TED talk, "How I use sonar to navigate the world" (TED, World Access for the Blind). TED's page calls him a perceptual navigation specialist.

This page is about the man: his childhood, how he started clicking, his degrees and his work, what he does with the clicks, the TED talk and braille. How echolocation works, what scientists found and how people learn it are in our guide to echolocation in blind people, so we keep that part short here. Pages were checked on October 30, 2026. Where sources disagree, we say so.

Key points

• Blind since 13 months. He was born with retinoblastoma, a cancer of the retina. One eye was removed at seven months and the other at 13 months (TED transcript, World Access for the Blind).
• Clicking since about age two. He came to it on his own, and his mother never tried to stop him (World Access for the Blind).
• Founder of World Access for the Blind, in 2000. The nonprofit teaches blind people to get around with tongue clicks and a long cane (TED, World Access for the Blind).
• TED talk in March 2015. "How I use sonar to navigate the world", given at TED2015 in Vancouver (TED, TED Ideas).
• He reads braille. As a boy he was a "voracious consumer of braille books," Men's Journal reported (Michael Finkel).

Daniel Kish at a glance

Each row is sourced in the sections below.

Early life: how he lost his sight

His organization's biography says he was born in March 1966 in Montebello, California (World Access for the Blind). It describes him as "Diagnosed with retinoblastoma, which is an aggressive cancer of the retina" and says "he lost one eye and then the other by the age of 13 months" (same page).

He told it in his own words at the start of his TED talk: "I was born with bilateral retinoblastoma, retinal cancer." His right eye was removed at seven months of age. "I was 13 months when they removed my left eye." The first thing he did after waking from that last surgery, he said, was climb out of his crib and wander around the intensive care nursery (TED transcript).

He wears prosthetic eyes. Michael Finkel's 2011 profile in Men's Journal describes him taking them out to clean them: thin shells of acrylic plastic (Michael Finkel). His organization describes him as totally blind. Not every blind person is: most have some sight, as our guide to what blind people see explains.

His parents, he said at TED, were not poetic about blindness. "They were pragmatic." They believed he should grow up with the same freedoms and responsibilities as everyone else, and he moved out at 18 (TED transcript).

How he started clicking

In a 2011 NPR interview, asked whether he started clicking as a kid, he said: "I've been clicking for as long as I can remember." (NPR, 2011). Finkel's profile, which his organization reproduces on its biography page, says he came to it on his own at about age two, roughly a year after his second eye was removed (World Access for the Blind, Michael Finkel).

According to the same profile, his mother never tried to talk him out of it. "That tongue click was everything to me," he told Finkel. He went to mainstream schools and relied almost entirely on echolocation to get around. At the time neither he nor his mother had a name for what he was doing; his family and friends called it his radar (same sources).

In the NPR interview he said clicking was only part of it. What matters, in his view, is a blind child's willingness to reach out and discover what is around them, and that process breaks when the child is kept in a playpen or a crib, or always guided by the hand (NPR, 2011).

Today he has his own name for the skill: "I call this process flash sonar." (TED transcript). His organization writes it as FlashSonar. In short, he makes a sharp click with his tongue and listens to how the sound comes back from what is around him. The science behind it is in echolocation in blind people.

School, degrees and certification

His organization says he attended the University of California, Riverside, California State University, San Bernardino, and Cal State LA, and earned two master's degrees: one in developmental psychology and one in special education (World Access for the Blind). He wrote a thesis on the history and science of human echolocation and, as part of it, devised one of the first echolocation training programs (same page). A 2011 research paper lists that work as a 1995 master's thesis from the psychology department at Cal State San Bernardino, titled "Evaluation of an echo-mobility program for young blind people" (Thaler, Arnott and Goodale, 2011).

He then became an orientation and mobility (O&M) specialist, the professional who teaches blind people to travel on their own. He holds two US certifications, COMS and NOMC, and "Daniel is the first totally blind individual to obtain both certifications" (World Access for the Blind). Finkel's profile, quoted on the same page, puts it another way: the first totally blind person in the United States, and likely the world, to be fully certified as an O&M specialist. Both credentials are explained in our white cane guide. His organization says he has worked in this field since 1996 as an itinerant instructor for school districts, rehabilitation agencies and private clients (same page).

World Access for the Blind

Running a nonprofit was never his goal, Finkel wrote: he planned to be a psychologist. But few blind people had his freedom of movement, and he had grown tired of how society saw blindness. "So in 2000, he started World Access for the Blind," his organization's page says (World Access for the Blind). TED's speaker page gives the same year (TED). The original Men's Journal text on Finkel's own site says 2001 in that sentence (Michael Finkel); we use 2000, the year both the organization and TED give.

World Access for the Blind is a California-registered 501(c)(3) nonprofit; its website today is visioneers.org, and Visioneers is a division of it (World Access for the Blind). Its method starts with "a click and a stick": the tongue click and a long cane (World Access for the Blind). Kish's view, as Finkel summed it up, is that blindness should be understood as "nothing more than an inconvenience" (World Access for the Blind).

The organization says he has worked with over 1,000 blind students, plus tens of thousands of professionals and members of the blindness community in over 40 countries (same page). At TED he gave a similar figure: training for tens of thousands of blind and sighted people in nearly 40 countries (TED transcript). These are the organization's own numbers.

It also says he co-wrote a textbook, Echolocation and FlashSonar, published in 2017 by the American Printing House for the Blind, and that "A braille edition is available as a free download" (World Access for the Blind).

What he does with echolocation

People who watch his videos usually ask about three things: the bike, the outdoors and the city. Here is what the sources document, with the year.

Riding a bike. As a boy of eight he rode his bike down hills shouting "Dive bomb!" and once crashed into trash cans and a light pole (World Access for the Blind, Michael Finkel). In March 2011, Men's Journal wrote that he could "pedal his mountain bike through streets heavy with traffic and on precipitous dirt trails" (Michael Finkel). The same month, NPR's Guy Raz rode alongside him in Culver City, Los Angeles, while Kish led the way with his clicks (NPR, 2011).

Hiking and the outdoors. "I like to hike," he told NPR in 2011 (NPR, 2011). Men's Journal reported the same year that he camps alone in the wilderness and had lived for weeks at a time in a tiny cabin a two-mile hike from the nearest road. From his journal: "I taught myself how to negotiate tricky, winding trails with sharp switchbacks" (Michael Finkel). In January 2015, NPR's Invisibilia followed him on a hike to a place he wanted to show the reporter (NPR, 2015).

Moving through cities. In 2011 Finkel walked with him on the busy streets of Long Beach, California, where he lived (Michael Finkel). In March 2015, TED's own writer followed him from his hotel in Vancouver to the stage for a rehearsal; backstage he moved "using both his cane and a few clicks" (TED Ideas).

The cane. Clicks don't replace his cane. At TED he described his long cane, longer than most blind people's: "I call it my freedom staff." (TED transcript). Finkel wrote that for most of his youth he never carried one, to avoid the stigma, but that he came to use it because echolocation is not good at finding holes in the ground or small drop-offs, and a cane is (Michael Finkel). For the everyday tools other blind people use, see how blind people do everyday things.

He isn't the only well-known blind adventurer to mention echolocation. Mountaineer Erik Weihenmayer told Guinness World Records that on his first rock climb as a teenager, "I was learning how to echolocate" (Guinness World Records, 2025); his story is in Erik Weihenmayer.

The TED talk

His talk is called "How I use sonar to navigate the world". TED's page lists it under TED2015, March 2015 (TED), and TED Ideas reported him in Vancouver that month to speak at TED2015 (TED Ideas). On October 30, 2026, TED's page showed more than 1.8 million plays.

What he covers (TED transcript):

• His story. He opens with clicks, then tells how he lost his eyes and how his parents raised him.
• The Batman nickname. He says his clicking earned him the moniker "the remarkable Batman", and accepts it: "Bats are cool. Batman is cool." But he says he was not raised to think of himself as remarkable. "I do not use my eyes, I use my brain."
• A demonstration. He asks the audience to close their eyes and listen while he makes a sound in front of a panel he holds still, so they can hear how an object changes the sound.
• The question at the end. TED's Chris Anderson asks what he has that sighted people don't. He answers: "Three hundred and sixty-degree view." His sonar, he says, works about as well behind him as in front.

The research he took part in

Scientists have studied his clicks. A 2011 brain-imaging study in PLoS ONE thanked him and Brian Bushway, "who acted as consultants throughout the experiments" (Thaler, Arnott and Goodale, 2011). The paper does not name its two expert echolocators, but World Access for the Blind says they were Kish and Bushway (World Access for the Blind). He is also a co-author of later studies, among them a 2017 paper in PLOS Computational Biology, "Mouth-clicks used by blind expert human echolocators", which lists him at World Access for the Blind in Placentia, California (Thaler et al., 2017). What those studies found is explained in echolocation in blind people.

Does Daniel Kish read braille?

Yes, though the sources say little about it. Finkel's 2011 profile, also reproduced by his organization, says that as a boy he was "a celebrated singer and voracious consumer of braille books" (Michael Finkel, World Access for the Blind). In the same profile Finkel quotes "the journal he braille-typed" and shared with him (Michael Finkel).

His organization also lists "Braille and large print instruction" among the programs he has coordinated and supervised, and offers his textbook in braille (World Access for the Blind). No source we found says which braille code he reads or how he uses braille today. If you are looking for books in braille, see braille books. For other blind people who made history, see famous blind people.

Where Braillito fits

Braillito, our app, teaches braille. It teaches the braille cells in lessons with exercises you play, with lives, levels and a daily streak: 59 lessons in 8 worlds in English. It also has a translator, a dictionary and a cell builder. The English lessons are uncontracted braille (grade 1); they don't teach contracted braille or transcription, and Braillito isn't a braille transcriber.

Nothing here means Daniel Kish uses or endorses Braillito. If his story makes you want to learn braille yourself, the cells are where it starts. The translator on braillito.com shows how a word or short phrase looks in UEB, but it only applies the rules a program can apply, so it doesn't replace a transcriber. Without paying, the braille translator works in any browser.

Braillito is a subscription with no free version; depending on the plan, it starts with a free trial or a discounted first period, if it's your first subscription (is Braillito free?). Get Braillito.

Frequently asked questions

Who is Daniel Kish?

An American who has been blind since he was 13 months old, gets around with tongue clicks and a long cane, and founded World Access for the Blind in 2000 to teach echolocation to other blind people (TED, World Access for the Blind).

How did Daniel Kish lose his sight?

He was born with retinoblastoma, a cancer of the retina. In his TED talk he said his right eye was removed at seven months and his left at 13 months (TED transcript).

Can anyone learn echolocation like Daniel Kish?

In a 10-week study, blind and sighted people aged 21 to 79 got better at it, but skill varies a lot and not all blind people can echolocate (Norman et al., 2021, Kolarik et al., 2014). The research and how people learn it are in our guide to echolocation in blind people.