[dbaust] Article: Dream Jobs 2012: Web Guru for the Blind

From: "Di Hartman" <diandjon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <dbaust@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 13:14:07 +1100
Dream Jobs 2012: Web Guru for the Blind


IBM researcher Chieko Asakawa can't see your website, but she can make it
better


By Eliza Strickland  /  February 2012 

Chieko Asakawa has just given the IEEE Spectrum website a once-over, and the
verdict isn't good. Her software program has declared that the site is
neither operable nor understandable, and it has decorated Spectrum's home
page with a series of red frowny faces. "I'm afraid it's pretty bad," she
says regretfully, smiling to soften the blow.

Asakawa isn't talking about what the site looks like-for someone who
navigates the site visually, it's a nicely organized wealth of information.
But for Asakawa, who is blind, it's a mess.

She uses an audio Web browser that reads content aloud, and on Spectrum's
home page it bogs down in category headings and subheadings, taking minutes
before it finally gets to an actual article headline. That's not unusual,
says Asakawa; many of the Web's wonders are still inaccessible to the
visually impaired. But Asakawa has done her best to change that through her
work at the Tokyo branch of IBM Research, where she has devoted herself to
improving blind people's access to computers and the Web for 27 years.

What began as a personal challenge grew gradually into a globetrotting
career, as a blind Osaka teenager became a cosmopolitan woman who knows the
New York City subway system from top to bottom. In her plain, unornamented
office, the elegant Asakawa toys with the string of pearls around her neck
and starts her story at the beginning.

She was born with normal vision and harbored early dreams of becoming an
Olympic athlete. But Asakawa's world began to darken at age 11, when she hit
her eye on the side of a swimming pool, damaging her optic nerve. She was
completely blind by 14, and her future seemed constrained. At that time in
Japan, many blind people were routed into careers in massage or acupuncture.
"I didn's want someone else to decide my job," says Asakawa. "So I made it
my goal to find a new type of job as a blind person." After getting a
bachelor's degree at Otemon Gakuin University, in Osaka, where she majored
in English literature, she heard about a two-year computer course for the
blind and signed up.

It was 1982, the twilight of mainframe computers and punch cards. Asakawa
learned to program by mastering a torturous device called the Optacon, which
used a camera to transmit the letters in a printed document, one by one, to
a grid of tiny rods that formed the shape of each letter beneath her
fingertips. She found the process excruciating, but she says there's a
Japanese word for people like her: makezugirai. It means a stubborn
character, or as Asakawa puts it, "someone who doesn's like to lose!"
Sticking out the computer course led to a one-year position at IBM Research
in Tokyo, which quickly evolved into a staff research job.

Times were already changing when Asakawa started at IBM in 1984: Personal
computers were taking off, the first Braille printer was on the market, and
an in-house IBM team had just developed a voice synthesizer that allowed
Asakawa to read e-mail and write code much more easily. For her first IBM
project she developed a digital Braille editor, which replaced clunky
Braille typewriters with a modern word processor. Next she rolled out a
network that allowed Braille libraries to upload and share documents and
books (at a then dazzling but now quaint speed of 300 bits per second).

Asakawa's position on IBM's technical team gave her direct access to the
personal computing revolution under way. And with each upheaval, Asakawa
found a new challenge. When a colleague set up a system that allowed Asakawa
to browse the Internet in the mid-1990s, she embarked on her mission to
bring the Web to blind people everywhere.

By 1997 she had developed a plug-in that worked with the Netscape browser,
mapping Web navigation commands to the computer keyboard's number pad and
using text-to-speech technology to read out content. Computer stores around
the world sold IBM's Home Page Reader, and Asakawa says its effect on the
blind community was immediate, electric, and sometimes touching. During one
training session for new users in Japan, she remembers a 70-year-old woman
who asked for help searching for health insurance for the elderly. "She knew
such information was available on the Web, but she couldn's get it by
herself," says Asakawa.

Other browsers for the blind followed IBM's groundbreaking efforts, and
Asakawa moved on to addressing a deeper problem: the fact that designers
were unintentionally creating inaccessible websites. She and her team wrote
a program called aDesigner-the software she used to reveal Spectrum's
flaws-to allow designers to experience a site as blind users do and to
suggest ways to improve navigation for audio browsers.

Today Asakawa is a fellow at IBM, a poised and fashionable role model for
women engineers, and a keen strategist for the company. In 2004, after
earning a Ph.D. in engineering from the University of Tokyo, she began to
think about how her research interests could mesh with IBM's global goals.
While she still works on new projects for the blind, she has broadened her
efforts to include Web accessibility tools for illiterate and aging
populations. That last category is of particular importance in Japan, where
40 percent of the population will be over the age of 65 by 2055.

Asakawa is glad to be a proselytizer for Web accessibility, but she longs
for a day when her missionary zeal won't be necessary. "Information access
has become so critical for our daily lives," she says in her soft but
forceful voice. "It's not a privilege; it's a human right."


________________________________

....................................................
Disclaimer: Dbaust is a free community service.  While reasonable efforts are 
taken to ensure that messages are accurate and appropriate in scope, the 
moderators are unable to take any responsibility for the actual content of 
posts from members or for the actions of list members.

To Leave dbaust, send an email to:
dbaust-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx

With "unsubscribe" in the subject or body of the message (without the quotes).  
Use "subscribe" instead if you want to re-subscribe to Dbaust.  

To post to vip-l, send email to:
dbaust@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Replies to emails on this list will go to the origional sender by default.
[dbaust] Article: Dream Jobs 2012: Web Guru for the Blind

Other related posts:
