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In a world driven by screens, one North Texas nonprofit is making sure no one gets left behind.
Computers for the Blind, based in Dallas, is opening doors for people across the country who are blind or visually impaired.
The nonprofit refurbishes donated computers and equips them with powerful accessibility software, providing life-changing technology to thousands who would otherwise go without it.
For Antoinette McDonald Ellis, receiving one of these computers was nothing short of transformational.
“I can send that email myself. I can look things up myself. Whatever I need to do on that computer, I have the ability now to go in there and do it. And not only that, I have the confidence,” she said.
Inside an office space off North Central Expressway, shelves are lined with more than machines—they’re gateways to independence.
The organization installs specialized software like JAWS, which converts text into speech, and ZoomText, which magnifies on-screen content. These tools allow users who are blind or have low vision to navigate the digital world with confidence and ease.
“What makes them different is they’re loaded with software that either makes the computer speak, or magnifies the screen,” explained Marci Duty, a Computers for the Blind employee who is herself completely blind.
Duty knows the impact firsthand. She previously trained others in Texas to use JAWS, and now plays a key role in helping ship computers across the country.
“We’ve almost shipped 22,000 computers,” Duty said. “And each one of them makes a big difference in a person’s life.”
The impact of the program isn’t just in the tech—it’s in the training and support that comes with it.
“When I first opened it and turned it on, and it spoke to me… I just kind of felt like I grew three or four inches,” Ellis recalled.
Computers for the Blind’s mission is about more than just providing hardware—it’s about bridging the digital divide and restoring a sense of community, creativity, and confidence for people who are often underserved in today’s fast-paced, tech-driven world.
“It gave me freedom,” Ellis said. “It’s given me the ability to go and feel like I’m part of this 21st-century world.”
With every computer shipped, Computers for the Blind brings more than technology—they bring independence, opportunity and a renewed sense of possibility.
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What should these protocols say about security?
Researchers and developers still don’t really understand how AI models work, and new vulnerabilities are being discovered all the time. For chatbot-style AI applications, malicious attacks can cause models to do all sorts of bad things, including regurgitating training data and spouting slurs. But for AI agents, which interact with the world on someone’s behalf, the possibilities are far riskier.
For example, one AI agent, made to read and send emails for someone, has already been shown to be vulnerable to what’s known as an indirect prompt injection attack. Essentially, an email could be written in a way that hijacks the AI model and causes it to malfunction. Then, if that agent has access to the user’s files, it could be instructed to send private documents to the attacker.
Some researchers believe that protocols like MCP should prevent agents from carrying out harmful actions like this. However, it does not at the moment. “Basically, it does not have any security design,” says Zhaorun Chen, a University of Chicago PhD student who works on AI agent security and uses MCP servers.
Bruce Schneier, a security researcher and activist, is skeptical that protocols like MCP will be able to do much to reduce the inherent risks that come with AI and is concerned that giving such technology more power will just give it more ability to cause harm in the real, physical world. “We just don’t have good answers on how to secure this stuff,” says Schneier. “It’s going to be a security cesspool really fast.”
Others are more hopeful. Security design could be added to MCP and A2A similar to the way it is for internet protocols like HTTPS (though the nature of attacks on AI systems is very different). And Chen and Anthropic believe that standardizing protocols like MCP and A2A can help make it easier to catch and resolve security issues even as is. Chen uses MCP in his research to test the roles different programs can play in attacks to better understand vulnerabilities. Chu at Anthropic believes that these tools could let cybersecurity companies more easily deal with attacks against agents, because it will be easier to unpack who sent what.
How open should these protocols be?
Although MCP and A2A are two of the most popular agent protocols available today, there are plenty of others in the works. Large companies like Cisco and IBM are working on their own protocols, and other groups have put forth different designs like Agora, designed by researchers at the University of Oxford, which upgrades an agent-service communication from human language to structured data in real time.
Many developers hope there could eventually be a registry of safe, trusted systems to navigate the proliferation of agents and tools. Others, including Chen, want users to be able to rate different services in something like a Yelp for AI agent tools. Some more niche protocols have even built blockchains on top of MCP and A2A so that servers can show they are not just spam.
#protocols #agents #navigate #messy #lives