Ted was driving a rental car down a dark road in the English countryside. The first race of the 1978 World Championships was won by a motorcycle racer from Florida. He was thinking about his next race when the other car drove towards him.
He was driving on the right side of the road. He made a right turn. The other driver was faithful to his British instincts. There was a head on collision. Henter had detached retinas and eighty stitches on his face, after his face broke the window and glass shards hit him. He thought to himself that he might have to miss the race.
Henter regained his sight in one eye, but as scar tissue formed, he lost his sight in the other. When he woke up after the second operation, he knew something wasn't the same. Everything had been good after the first surgery. Everything was dark again.
When I woke up in the hospital, I felt a calm spirit in the room. It was possible that it was an angel. I was told not to sweat it. Everything will be alright.
The blind people have been around for a long time. I can make it if they did it.
He was at a loss but his racing days were over. Henter had a degree in mechanical engineering from the University of Florida. There were a couple of patents that he had.
It was hard to work as a mechanical engineer with blindness. A counselor told him that computer programming was a popular career for people who are blind.
He got a degree in computer science. He learned to program by having a volunteer read the screen to him. A high school student recorded and listened to books he read at school. That was a lot of work. Henter said that he learned how to program computers.
When he got his first job, he had a computer. Deane Blazie's screen reader could only read one character at a time. The word "PRINT" would be pronounced as "P-R-I-N-T" instead of "PRINT"
This was a game-changing event. He was able to perform his job on his own. Henter became the most known user when the next version was able to read a single word at a time. Blazie, the head of the company, offered him a job soon after. Henter remembers a welcoming environment and colleagues who respected him.
He learned to program by typing code out on the terminal and having a volunteer read the screen back to him
He was an advocate for the product. He was sent to Chicago to teach a businessman how to use a screen reader. Joyce had lost her sight in an industrial accident. The two men shared a love of water skiing. Henter won the gold medal in the 1991 World Disabled Water Ski Championships, despite missing the chance to become a motorcycling champion.
Henter wanted to add features to screen readers. They could create a company together.
They released the first version of their screen reader for the computer operating system in 1987. They called it JAWS, which stands for Job Access With Speech, but is also a playful reference to another DOS screen reader called Flipper.
JAWS was not the only screen reader in the market, but it had original features like the dual scruple, one application scruple for navigating elements on the page and another that could move freely. It had a script language for users to modify their work.
Everyone was moving to graphic operating systems like Windows by that time. Users called him worried about when the Windows version would come out. If I can't use Windows, I'll lose my job.
It was a difficult leap from text to graphics. The concept of the screen reader had to be completely reinvented. The winter of 1995 saw the release of JAWS for Windows. Microsoft built a native version of JAWS after buying the code to make it better. JAWS would soon own the majority of market share.
Chances are you don't think about how a software engineer programs while blind. You probably didn't think about how people who are blind use computers.
If you are a Mac user, you might have considered VoiceOver an annoyance that pops up when you accidentally press a certain combination of keys, only to quickly turn it off.
A screen reader is used to navigate a computer by audio. In other words, screen readers are used by people who are blind or partially blind.
There is a large market for screen readers. In 2020, the estimated number of blind people was almost half a billion. The number of people with moderate to severe visual impairment has gone up. Millions of people use magnification tools.
In a recent Stackoverflow survey of developers, 1,142 people said that they are blind or have difficulty seeing.
Since the release of JAWS for Windows, tens of thousands of blind and partiallysighted programmers have entered the world of software development. The accessibility barriers for people who are blind are lower than in many hands-on jobs. Thanks to JAWS, a piece of software, this is a thing of the past.
JAWS dates back to the same generation of software as Internet Explorer 1.0
Only a few pieces of software are still around. The same generation of software as Internet Explorer 1.0 officially retired last month. It's even more rare that JAWS has retained its usage share. Netscape took over the market after two years at the top of Mosaic. After three years, the majority of users were using internet explorer, which was overshadowed by chrome. For the last 10 years, chrome has been the supreme choice. JAWS has been the gold standard of screen readers for three years in a row.
A new top-of-the-line monitor and an older, lower-resolution model do the same thing. A low-resolution display is still a display. An outdated display isn't bad if you have a bad screen reader. Imagine a monitor that can't display certain objects on the screen, can't properly render colors, or show elements off from where they should be. Bad screen readers are not just mediocre, they are also liars. Even though JAWS has a hefty price tag, it is still popular.
Bad screen readers aren’t just mediocre; they lie
The price of JAWS is not insignificant. The cost of a home license is $1,000 and future updates cost more. The U.S. is the only place where annual licenses cost less than $90. For a long time, a good, reliable screen reader was not an option for most blind or partiallysighted people.
JAWS was overtaken in popularity by an open-sourced alternative called NonVisual Desktop Access. JAWS regained its market share in 2020. In a small Australian town, a music camp for teens started the revolution in accessibility.
A decade ago, a 10-year-old and a nine-year-old met at a music camp for children with visual impairments. Each boy saw something in the other that made them like each other.
Since he got his first computer, he's been interested in programming. The Commodore 64 didn't have a screen reader so he had to get other people to read it for him. When a seven-year-old boy got an Apple II, he was able to access his computer on his own.
ebooks weren't a thing back then so my dad had to read programming books to me The most boring thing in the world for my dad was reading these books. I just liked it.
“My dad would have to read programming books to me because ebooks weren’t a thing back then.”
The two began making music and software together. One of their projects made it possible for people who are blind to do audio engineering. They spent a lot of time in each other's homes. There was a constant question about why there wasn't a free screen reader for people who are blind. Why is it so expensive?
The student took a break from school. He started hacking his ideas into a prototype with free time on his hands.
Many people were more qualified than I was back then. There were people who talked about creating a free screen reader. I wrote the first line of code, which is different from them.
He joined a few months later after a full time job. It was fun and interesting, but I wasn't sure how serious it would be. Both of us believed in the idea of open source.
“The one difference between me and them is that I wrote the first line of code.”
The CSUN Assistive Technology Conference is the largest conference of its kind hosted by the Center for Disabilities at California State University, Northridge. He met people from all over the world. They realized that they had reached escape speed. It wasn't their pet project anymore. The two men founded a nonprofit to take the project long-term.
When it was first introduced, users thought it was good enough for home use but not suited for professional work. It was free and people thought it wasn't as good as a commercial screen reader. As the project grew, that changed as well. The number of contributors grew as well as the number of languages. The accessibility teams at Microsoft and Mozilla wanted to work together to make it easier for people with disabilities to use the internet.
Since the survey began in 2009, JAWS has been the most popular screen reader. Since the beginning of the year, JAWS has been in decline.
The community is excited about the software. The discussion of screen readers can become religious. One user asked how three different screen readers compare in a letter to the community.
There are some people in the community who are young. Some users went on to study computer science and become developers. Since the 80s, three generations of blind programmers have written software for each other.
One of those kids is Tuukka Ojala, a blind software developer.
The first computer Ojala used at school didn't have a screen reader. Ojala spent the same amount of time learning touch typing as he did learning handwriting. The typewriter was a fancy one. He got a demo version of JAWS on his first computer. The computer would run for 40 or 45 minutes at a time, and Ojala had to shut it down. He didn't have the money to pay for the license and future upgrades. He learned to program while running the JAWS demo.
Ojala made a bet with a friend on how long he would stay with the company. Ojala tells me that the primary reason was not that it was better than JAWS. It was supposed to last a month. Despite the fact that price is no longer an issue, Ojala is still using the product. Ojala says that the features of the organization are tailored to what he needs. There are many add-ons, like optical character recognition, that can be upgraded quickly. Most of the time I use computers, I use the same software.
Ojala works on back end systems. Ojala describes himself as someone who is interested in the software but still cares about the rest of it. Even though I don't work with the front end as much, I still like to understand how the end users use it.
Accessibility screw-ups, technological or not, are massively scalable
Only a few software tools give Ojala a smooth experience. Most companies don't pay much attention to accessibility, they just do the minimum to meet regulatory compliance. People think that accessibility is a nice addition to their product. It feels haphazard when they tack on accessibility later. Imagine first creating a product with a colored interface, then adding colors later as an add-on, only to use the wrong color combinations.
There are a lot of accessibility screw-ups. The US dollar bills are exactly the same size for all denominations. In the past, blind Americans would have had to carry around a separate device just to identify the bills or trust the cashier. Different sized bills are used by many other currencies. When systems don't make it easy for people with disabilities to get around, the burden is passed on to them. The people who designed the system thoughtlessly.
I was unaware of the world of screen readers until I read a post about how to prepare for being blind. I tried to navigate my website with a native screen reader on my computer. I was horrified to discover that the interface was a chimeric one. Over the years, as I made ad hoc changes to my website, I mangled theHTML hierarchy so much that it was rendered useless to me.
The history of screen readers is as important to the blind programmers who pioneered the field as it is to the sighted programmers who don't use screens. I would like to go to the local computer store and purchase a computer for myself. I shouldn't have to purchase a screen reader or download one. It shouldn't be the blind programmers who write the tools.
They did that. They have built software that is life-changing in a variety of ways. Their legacies are not only in the operating systems that have adopted their products, but also in the programmers who have pursued them.
His father read programming books to him when he was a child. Screen readers have been a part of Ojala's life since he started programming.
It took Ojala a long time to figure it out. He couldn't explain why it seemed like a big deal to them.
Ojala says his way of working is the only one he knows. There are no other ways to code.
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