So I’m annoyed today. I accidentally stumbled on a Wikipedia article recently: List of Programmers. There is one and only one blind programmer on that list. Wanna guess who it is? Ted Henter of Henter-Joyce (now Freedom Scientific). I can name you many blind programmers who have done noteworthy things and belong on that list.
Larry Skutchan of American Printing House for the Blind. Known for TextTalker (Apple II screenreader), ASAP (DOS screenreader), and much much more.
Tim Cranmer. Best known for the Cranmer modified Perkins braille writer, an early electronic braille embosser.
T.V. Raman. Known for: emacspeak (a self-voicing extension for emacs), Chromevox, Talkback on Android).
The numerous brltty hackers: Nikhil Nair, Nicolas Pitre, Dave Mielke, Stephane Doyon, Mario Lang, et al. Brltty is used for braille support on Linux and other Unixes. It is also used by NVDA on Windows. I think it might be used under the hood for braille support on Android. If it isn’t, then liblouis definitely is, and liblouis was initially the creation of deaf-blind hacker John J. Boyer.
Karl Dahlke. Known for: edbrowse, various speech adapters. This man has been rolling his own accessibility solutions since the Apple II days in the early 80s. He wrote a text to speech system for his ATT 3B workstation and posted it to the net.sources Usenet group. Truly an amazing man, a personal hero, mentor, and friend.
Kirk Reiser. Best known for: Speakup, a Linux console screenreader. A community grew up around this. Speakup-enabled boot and rescue disks gave a lot of blind people an on-ramp to Linux.
Michael Curran and James Teh, the people behind NVDA, the first and only free screenreader for Windows.
That’s still an incomplete list. I’d also say that Matt Campbell @97d8ce43 probably belongs on it, and if he doesn’t, he’ll probably end up there on account of his AccessKit work.
There’s my hat-tip to blind hackers, inventors, and tinkers.
Notes by c277828b | export