Three things with pro surfer Matt Formston: ‘Voiceover technology just opened my whole world’

Matt Formston started bodyboarding at age five, graduating to surfing when he was 11. Tackling the waves is no mean feat for any kid, but for Formston it came with an extra challenge: he is legally blind. By the time he started bodyboarding, Formston had already been diagnosed with macular dystrophy, a degenerative condition that eventually reduced his eyesight to almost zero.

Initially, Formston’s dad and brother guided him on to the waves but in time the Sydneysider began paddling out by himself, learning to hear and feel the incoming waves. Today, he’s a pro surfer who this month earned the Guinness world record for the largest wave surfed by a blind surfer – a monstrous 50-foot swell.

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“Now I can feel the wave and surf like an able-bodied person does. But it’s been a long, long, long process and a lot of wipeouts and a lot of lessons learned along the way,” Formston says.

One development that has made life a lot easier for Formston in recent years is an AI-powered app on his phone. Here, he tells us about that very handy tool, as well as the stories of two other important belongings.

What I’d save from my house in a fire

A guitar that belonged to my grandfather. He was the head guitar teacher at the Conservatorium of Music in Sydney for a while and was a session guitarist with a lot of famous musicians. That was his whole livelihood – as a guitarist.

He taught me guitar. We were close, but he was a really hard man and because of the purity of the way he played, it was hard for us to work together. But I ended up playing in bands later in life, so I feel like he was definitely my musical inspiration. We got given a bunch of guitars when he passed, but my favourite is an antique Ovation – a nylon acoustic. If I could only grab one instrument, it’s that one.

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My most useful object

An app on my phone that reads things out to me. If I go into a supermarket and point it at the shelf, it reads out what’s there and the price. I can be in a restaurant and it reads out the menu to me. There are a few different apps that do it, but Seeing AI by Microsoft was the original version. It’s been really life-changing for me – before, I couldn’t do the groceries on my own.

The app does a few other cool things as well. It scans colours, so I can point it at something and it will tell me what colour it is … so I don’t pick two things that clash.

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It’s also got a great party trick. There’s a tab for facial recognition. It takes a photo of a person and will say, “that’s a 34-year-old lady with brown hair looking happy,” and it’s so accurate. It’s normally within two years of the person’s actual age. So everyone’s like, “do me next, do me next!”

I’ve had it for probably about five years now. But going back even further, the thing that changed my life even more was voiceover technology [when the iPhone 3GS came out in 2009]. I could touch text on a phone and it would read it out to me. Suddenly I had access to my calendar, my emails, my text messages, my contacts. It just opened my whole world. So all this accessibility technology has been a massive game-shifter for me.

The item I most regret losing

Every time I do an interview, the publication wants photos of me when I was a kid and began losing my vision. When I first started out as a public figure, I would give them the photos. They’d always say, we want to scan them, but we’ll definitely give them back to you. And through that process, I lost pretty much all my photos of me as a kid and with my family, either because the photos didn’t get sent back to me – or they did, but then I didn’t put them back in the photo album and they got misplaced.

When people ask for photos now, I say, well, you can bring a scanner to my house and scan what’s left of them here. My wife’s always saying, “Oh, you’re such a prima donna!” But you just end up having certain processes that you won’t budge on because they affect your life.

• The Blind Sea, a documentary about Matt Formston, shows at the Sydney Opera House on 11 August as part of the First Wave surf film program , and will be in cinemas nationwide from 15 August