-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: [tech-vi Announce List] From The Verge: The hidden history of
screen readers
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2022 21:33:21 +0000
From: David Goldfield <david.goldfield@xxxxxxxxxxx>
Reply-To: tech-vi@xxxxxxxxx
To: Tech-VI Announcement List <tech-vi@xxxxxxxxx>
From the Tech-VI list owner:
This is an excellent and well-researched article. I have a few comments
from the perspective of someone who has been using screen readers since
1991 and who saw the Windows screen reader landscape as it was unfolding.
The article mentions Ted Henter using a computer from Maryland Computer
Services, owned by Deane Blazie before he founded Blazie Engineering. I
had experience in using two different computers from MCS but they were a
bit more advanced than the earlier model described in this article.
Deane would later start Blazie Engineering which sold products which are
still fondly remembered to this day, including the Braille ‘n Speak. I
had the privilege of working for Blazie Engineering for nearly seven
years starting in 1991, two years after purchasing the Braille ‘n Speak
and realizing that I wanted to be a part of the company that produced
such an amazing and revolutionary device.
My career with Blazie Engineering exposed me to the world of screen
readers beyond Vocal-eyes which is what I was using prior to my role at
the company. I can, therefore, tell you that the article isn’t correct
when it mentions that JAWS for Windows was released before its
competitors. It was released before Window-eyes but prior to JAWS for
Windows we already had Window Bridge from Synthavoice as well as Windows
Master from Blazie Engineering. There may have been at least one other
screen reader prior to JFW but I’m not certain if my memory is correct
about that. I remember we were working on developing Windows Master
probably in 1992 and that may have been the year that Windows Master was
released. We were learning it on our own as we didn’t have tutorials and
other training materials available to us that addressed Windows from a
blindness perspective.
The article also mentioned Flipper. I used a demo of it very briefly but
never really gravitated toward using it. It was a DOS-based screen
reader developed by a company called Omnicron (not sure if the spelling
is correct on that name.) If memory serves it was owned by Steve and
Cynthia Smith, a literal mom and pop operation. I personally gravitated
toward ASAP from Microtalk, owned by Larry Skutchan who I had many phone
calls with as he was perfecting ASAP’s support for the BNS as a speech
synthesizer and also had many pleasant phone calls with Dennis Brown who
was the main tech support rep working for Larry. I also used and greatly
respected JAWS for DOS which had a very sophisticated and powerful macro
editor which would allow you to customize JAWS in some impressive ways.
I remember installing and using JAWS for Windows 1.0 in 1995 and have
used every subsequent version of the program. Window-eyes was released
later that year but I didn’t start using that screen reader until after
I left Blazie Engineering and began providing computer training to blind
children as part of the Computer Proficiency program from the state of
New Jersey where children needing a screen reader were given Window-Eyes.
The Verge - Thursday, July 14, 2022 at 8:05 AM
The hidden history of screen readers
Image removed by sender. A character sits on top of a tower, with audio
waveforms floating on either side of his head. The tower is covered in
circuits and displays. The first display shows an audio waveform, and
the one below shows code for a program.
On a night in 1978, Ted Henter was driving a rental car down a dark road
in the English countryside. A 27-year-old motorcycle racer from Florida,
Henter had just won eighth place in the Venezuelan Grand Prix, the first
race of the 1978 World Championships. He was daydreaming about his next
race in Spain when he saw the other car driving straight towards him.
Henter had been driving on the right side of the road, just as he did
back home. Instinctively, he swerved right. But the other driver,
faithful to his own British instincts, swerved left. It was a head-on
collision. Henter’s face broke the windshield and glass shards left him
with detached retinas and eighty stitches on his face — including
thirteen on each eyeball. Lying in the hospital, he thought to himself,
/Maybe I’ll have to miss the race. /
The first operation to reattach his retina was successful, and Henter
regained his sight in one eye — he could see light and some colors — but
as scar tissue formed, the retina detached again. When he woke up after
the second operation, Henter knew things were different this time. After
the first operation, everything had been bright. But the second time,
everything was dark.
“I had about ten minutes of despair in the hospital when I felt a very
calming spirit in the room. Maybe it was an angel,” Henter recalls. “It
more or less said to me, ‘Don’t sweat it. Everything is going to be okay.’”
/Eh, blind people have been around for millennia,/ Henter remembers
thinking to himself. /If they made it, I can make it. /
------------------------------------------------------------------------
His racing days were over, but Henter wasn’t entirely at a loss. Before
his motorcycling career began, Henter had earned a mechanical
engineering degree from the University of Florida. He even had a couple
of patents.
Blindness made working as a mechanical engineer difficult. When he
consulted Florida’s Division of Blind Services, a counselor told him
that computer programming was becoming a popular career for people who
are blind.
Henter went back to school for a degree in computer science. He learned
to program by typing code out on the terminal and having a volunteer
read the screen back to him. A local high school student read
programming books for him, which he recorded and listened to on tapes.
“That was pretty slow and tedious. But I learned how to program
computers,” says Henter.
It wasn’t until his first job when Henter got what he calls a “talking
computer.” This ancestral screen reader
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created by Deane Blazie, could only read one character at a time. (For
example, the word “PRINT” would be pronounced not as one syllable but as
“P-R-I-N-T.”)
Nonetheless, this was a game changer. Henter could perform his job
without any assistance. When the next version — one that could read a
word at a time — came out, Henter regularly called the company for tech
support and became the most known user. Blazie, the head of the company
— who would go down in history as one of the few sighted pioneers
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of the assistive technology industry — soon offered him a job. Years
later, Henter recalls Maryland Computer Services with warmth,
remembering a welcoming environment and colleagues who respected him.
Henter was both an engineer and an advocate for the product. He was sent
on a trip to Chicago to train a high-profile customer — a businessman
named Bill Joyce — on using a screen reader. An explosion in an
industrial accident had left Joyce blind and partially deaf. The two men
became close friends, bonding over their love of water skiing. (Although
Henter had missed the chance of becoming a motorcycling champion, he
would win the gold medal as best overall skier in the 1991 World
Disabled Water Ski Championships and six national championships.)
While training Joyce, Henter would throw ideas around the features he’d
like to add to screen readers. Eventually, Joyce proposed that they
create a company together.
In 1987, they founded Henter-Joyce and soon released the first version
of their screen reader for DOS. They called it JAWS, which stands for
Job Access With Speech, but is also a playful reference to another DOS
screen reader called Flipper, like the dolphin in an eponymous 1960s TV
show.
JAWS was not the only screen reader in the market, but it had original
features like the dual cursor — one application cursor for navigating
elements on the page and another that could move freely like how our
eyes move around the screen. It also had built-in Braille support and a
scripting language for users to customize their workflow.
By then, the computer industry had undergone a sea change: everyone was
moving to graphic operating systems like Windows. Henter started getting
worried calls from his users: “When is the Windows version coming out?
I’m going to lose my job if I can’t use Windows.”
The leap from text to graphics presented a fiendish challenge. The data
model behind the concept of the screen reader had to be completely
reimagined. Nonetheless, in the winter of 1995, Henter-Joyce released
JAWS for Windows months ahead of competitors. JAWS was so good that
Microsoft bought the code
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and built on top of it to create its own native version. Microsoft’s
project eventually went nowhere, but JAWS would soon own the majority of
market share.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
If you are sighted, chances are that you’ve rarely thought about how a
software engineer programs while blind
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You may have not even given much thought to how people who are blind use
computers at all.
If you are a Mac user, you may have regarded VoiceOver — macOS’s native
screen reader — as an annoyance that pops up when you inadvertently
press a certain combination of keys, only to swiftly turn it off.
A screen reader allows its user to navigate a computer by audio — it’s a
primary interface to visual elements of a computer. In other words,
screen readers are to blind or partially sighted users what monitors are
to sighted users.
The market for screen readers is hardly niche. In 2020, the estimated
number of blind people
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worldwide was 49.1 million — comparable to the population of Spain or
South Korea. An additional 255 million people have moderate to severe
visual impairment. These millions of people may use magnification tools,
Braille support, or screen readers.
And while good statistics on blind programmers are hard to come by, in a
recent Stackoverflow
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survey of developers, 1,142 people — approximately 1.7% of total
participants — replied, “I am blind / have difficulty seeing.”
Nearly three decades have passed since JAWS for Windows was released,
during which possibly tens of thousands of blind and partially sighted
programmers entered software development. Just as it was in Henter’s
time, it’s a field that is relatively inclusive for people who are
blind, as the accessibility barriers are lower than in many hands-on
jobs. These days, this is in no small part thanks to JAWS, a piece of
software pioneered by a blind programmer.
Very few pieces of software survive this long. JAWS dates back to the
same generation of software as Internet Explorer 1.0, which officially
retired last month
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after 27 years. The fact that JAWS has retained its usage share
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makes it an even greater rarity. The browser Mosaic, heralded in 1994 as
the “world’s standard interface
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lasted only two years at the top before Netscape took over the market.
Three years later, the majority of users were using Internet Explorer,
which was overshadowed by Chrome just in twelve years. Chrome has
reigned supreme for about a decade. JAWS has been the gold standard of
screen readers for almost three times as long of a period.
To return to the monitor analogy: a brand new top-of-the-line monitor
and an older, lower-resolution model do more or less the same job. The
high-resolution display is /better/, but a display with low resolution
is still a display. However, a bad screen reader isn’t bad the way that
an outdated display is. Imagine a monitor with islands of dead pixels,
incapable of displaying certain objects on the screen, incorrectly
rendering or even outright inverting colors, or showing elements several
pixels off from where they should be. In other words, bad screen readers
aren’t just mediocre; they /lie/. There’s a good reason why JAWS has
remained so popular, even with its hefty price tag.
That said, the price of JAWS is no small barrier. One home license
currently costs $1,000 ($1,285 for a professional license), and future
updates cost extra. Annual licenses that cost $95 ($90 for students) are
available only in the U.S. 89% of people with vision loss come from
low-income and middle-income countries
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For a long time, a good, reliable screen reader was simply not an option
for the majority of blind or partially sighted people around the world.
It was only in 2019 that an open-source alternative — NonVisual Desktop
Access (NVDA) — finally overtook JAWS in popularity
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(JAWS took back its dominant market share in 2020, but just barely).
This revolution in accessibility began in an unlikely place: a music
camp for teens in the small Australian town of Mittagong.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
In 1994, a 10-year-old Michael Curran met nine-year-old Jamie Teh at a
weeklong music camp for young Braille-reading students around Australia.
Each boy saw something of himself in the other and quickly bonded over
their mutual interest in computers.
Teh had been interested in programming ever since he got his first
computer, a Commodore 64. Because the Commodore 64 did not have a screen
reader, Teh, like Henter, had to get other people to read the screen for
him. When a seven-year-old Teh finally got an Apple II, which did have a
screen reader, he could at last access everything on the computer on his
own.
“But my dad would have to read programming books to me because ebooks
weren’t a thing back then,” says Teh. “So my poor dad would come into my
room and read these books, which were the most boring thing in the world
for him. But I just loved it.”
A few years later, Curran and Teh started making both music and software
together. (Their interests often blended; one of their projects added
accessibility in audio engineering software, enabling people who are
blind to do music production and sound engineering.) They often spent
nights in each other’s houses, engrossed in late-night philosophical
conversations. The same question came up time and time again: Why isn’t
there a free screen reader for people who are blind? Why does it have to
cost thousands of dollars?
In 2006, Curran took a break from university. With free time on his
hands, he started to put his ideas into practice, hacking together the
prototype of what would become NVDA.
“There were many people, even in the blindness community, way more
qualified than me back then. In fact, there were even people who used to
talk about creating a free screen reader,” says Curran. “The one
difference between me and them is that I wrote the first line of code.”
Teh had a full-time job but he joined a few months later. “I didn’t know
how serious it was going to be, but it was fun and interesting,” says
Curran. “Because we both very strongly believed in the concept of open
source, we made NVDA completely open source.”
A year later, Mozilla approached the duo and funded Curran to attend the
CSUN Assistive Technology Conference, the largest conference of its kind
hosted by the Center on Disabilities at California State University,
Northridge. There, Curran met like-minded enthusiasts from across the
world. That was when they realized NVDA had reached escape velocity. It
was no longer their pet project. Shortly thereafter, Curran and Teh
founded NV Access, a nonprofit with a governance structure to take the
project long-term.
In its early years, users considered NVDA good enough for home use but
unsuited for professional tasks. The fact that it was free gave people
the impression that its quality wasn’t on par with commercial screen
readers. But that began to change as the project grew. The number of
contributors ballooned, and NVDA expanded to more than 60 languages.
Accessibility teams at Google, Microsoft, and Mozilla wanted to work
together to make NVDA integrate well with their platforms and browsers.
According to the bi-annual survey of screen reader users
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conducted by WebAIM— a Utah-based organization that provides web
accessibility solutions — JAWS had been the most popular primary screen
reader since the survey began in 2009. But since 2019, NVDA has rivaled
JAWS in popularity.
The NVDA community is enthusiastic, even passionate about the software.
Discussions comparing one screen reader to another — very much like the
iPhone vs. Android or Chrome vs. Firefox debates — can become religious.
(“I realize I’m opening up a can of worms,” wrote
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one user to the NVDA community’s mailing list, asking how three
different screen readers compare.)
Some community members are young — Curran can remember “kids who got
interested in NVDA” when they were “like 13 or just starting high
school.” Some of these young users would go on to study computer
science, becoming developers themselves. Three generations of blind
programmers have been writing software for each other since Henter began
JAWS in the 80s.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tuukka Ojala, a blind software developer based in Finland
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is one of those kids that Curran speaks of.
Ojala had always been curious about technology and computers, but the
first computer he used at school had no screen reader installed. “When
other kids were learning handwriting, I spent the same time learning
touch typing,” Ojala says. “It was more or less a fancy typewriter.”
Things changed when he got his own computer for the first time, a
machine that came with a demo version of JAWS. “It would run for like 40
or 45 minutes at a time, and I had to reboot the computer,” says Ojala.
He couldn’t afford the license, let alone the price of future upgrades.
Still, in less than a year, while running the JAWS demo in those short
increments, he’d learned to program.
In 2011, Ojala made a bet with a friend on how long he could stick with
NVDA, which was still in its early stages. “Back then, the primary
reason for using NVDA was not that it was actually better than JAWS in
significant ways,” Ojala tells me. The bet was supposed to last a month.
More than a decade later, Ojala is still using NVDA even though price is
no longer an issue. “The features NVDA has or chooses to develop are
more tailored to what I need,” says Ojala. Upgrades are quick and
add-ons — like optical character recognition (OCR) — are extensive.
“I’ve used NVDA for most of the time I’ve used computers.”
At his company, Ojala primarily works on backend systems. “I often
describe myself as someone who is interested in backend but still cares
about the whole software, so I do usability testing as well,” says
Ojala. “I like to understand how the end users use it even though I
don’t work with the front end as much.”
But only a handful of software tools give Ojala a frictionless
experience. For most companies, accessibility isn’t a priority, or
worse, something that they pay lip service to while doing the bare
minimum to meet regulatory compliance. Ojala’s pet peeve is people
thinking that accessibility is a feature, a nice-to-have addition to
your product. When they tack on accessibility later, without thinking
about it from the very beginning, Ojala can tell — it feels haphazard.
(Imagine first creating a product with a colorless UI, then to add
colors later as an afterthought, only to use the wrong color combination.)
Accessibility screw-ups, technological or not, are massively scalable.
Take for example, how US dollar bills are identically sized for every
denomination. Before smartphones, blind Americans would have had to
carry around a separate — and costly — device just for identifying the
bills, or otherwise place trust in every cashier they met. (Many other
currencies use differently sized bills for exactly this reason). When
systems don’t build in accessibility, the burden passes to individuals
with disabilities to make up for it on their own, often by buying
expensive technologies. Makeshift solutions are only necessary because
of the thoughtlessness of the people who designed the system.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
As a sighted programmer, I’d been oblivious to the world of screen
readers until I came across a post titled “I’m a software engineer going
blind, how should I prepare?
<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2Fitem%3Fid%3D22918980&data=05%7C01%7C%7Ce82fca8990fd4e09a34808da65b8376d%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637934139126600049%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=lMePkTb%2F7rvhdVuPhX%2Fk%2F5UfIBT2U8neqkUUDxobjS4%3D&reserved=0>”
One recent evening, I tried navigating my personal website, eyes closed,
with macOS’ native screen reader VoiceOver. I was soon mortified to
learn that underneath the ostensibly clean interface was a chimeric HTML
structure. As I made ad hoc changes to my website — mainly written in a
language called Go — over the years, I had mangled the HTML hierarchy so
much that it was rendered inaccessible even to myself.
The history of screen readers is as much a transcendent achievement for
the blind programmers who pioneered the field as it is a rebuke to
sighted programmers, without whose neglect non-native screen readers
might not have to exist. “As a blind person, I want to go to the local
computer store, buy a computer and just use it. I shouldn’t have to go
and buy or even have to download another screen reader,” Curran says.
Blind programmers shouldn’t /have/ to be the ones writing tools for
blind people.
But nevertheless, they’ve done exactly that. They have built — sometimes
on top of each other, sometimes chaotically and in parallel — software
that is life-changing in the literal sense. And their legacies endure,
not just in the operating systems that have adopted their products, but
in the programmers who have come after them.
Henter relied on volunteers to read screens out loud for him; Teh’s
father read programming books to him as a child. For Ojala, screen
readers have been part of his life as a programmer from the start.
It took Ojala quite a long time to figure out why sighted people kept
asking, “How can you code?” It seemed like a big deal to them, but he
couldn’t make out why.
“My way of working is the only way I know,” Ojala says. “I don’t know of
any other ways to code.”
https://www.theverge.com/23203911/screen-readers-history-blind-henter-curran-teh-nvda
<https://nam12.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.theverge.com%2F23203911%2Fscreen-readers-history-blind-henter-curran-teh-nvda&data=05%7C01%7C%7Ce82fca8990fd4e09a34808da65b8376d%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C637934139126600049%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=5Us6Lz5soOEtLFoDsOLHhrJEBlq0Lfh9J5bz7D1Aq3U%3D&reserved=0>
David Goldfield,
Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist
JAWS Certified, 2022
<https://www.freedomscientific.com/Training/Certification>
NVDA Certified Expert <https://certification.nvaccess.org/>
Subscribe to the Tech-VI announcement list to receive news, events and
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Email: tech-vi+subscribe@xxxxxxxxx <mailto:tech-vi+subscribe@xxxxxxxxx>
www.DavidGoldfield.org <http://www.DavidGoldfield.org>
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