[HN Gopher] David Holladay, blindness technology pioneer, has died
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David Holladay, blindness technology pioneer, has died
Author : sholladay
Score : 143 points
Date : 2024-03-03 08:38 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.braillists.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.braillists.org)
| sholladay wrote:
| My father passed away a couple of weeks ago. And while it's never
| easy to lose a family member, it's been heartwarming to hear
| stories of how he impacted people's lives.
|
| It's likely that a number of HN users have used or benefited from
| his braille translation software, in the form of BRAILLE-EDIT,
| MegaDots, DBT, or the accessibility tools built into some of the
| most popular smartphones. He built braille-to-print (and vice
| versa) translation tools for probably every language you have
| ever heard of and then some. His work in this field started all
| the way back with the Apple II.
|
| Anyone interested in the history of braille translation
| technology may want to check out the archive of the Raised Dot
| Computing Newsletter, written by David and his wife, Caryn Navy,
| in the 80s and 90s.
|
| https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/news/
| hkt wrote:
| I don't use braille technology myself, but a couple of the best
| friends I've made online do. Tech like what your father worked
| on enabled them to participate in online discourse, and so
| enabled those friendships. I'll always be grateful.
| jankins wrote:
| A braille embosser is pretty much the soundtrack to my
| childhood (along with the dectalk pronouncing "c colon
| backslash greater-than"). My dad is blind and I'm so
| appreciative of the technologies that helped him succeed
| alongside his sighted colleagues. I also credit his love of
| technology for my own career.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I've not used Braille anything, but vision-impaired
| accessibility has always been a big part of all of my frontend
| work. In fact, accessibility, in general, is quite important to
| me.
|
| It's likely that his work affected a lot of the tools I use.
|
| My condolences on your loss. It sounds like his last few years
| were pretty rough. I can relate. My own father had a very bad
| last decade.
| neomantra wrote:
| My condolences on the passing of your father and thank you for
| bringing this to HN. I write this to further contextualize his
| impact.
|
| In the late 90's, my career was in haptics (touch:haptics as
| vision:graphics) -- at first focusing on haptic rendering of 3D
| scenes for virtual environments (e.g. medical, military
| simulation) and then landing at Immersion to make consumer
| devices. We leveraged Microsoft's ActiveAccessiblity feature to
| allow "feeling" the Desktop, an experience which, via
| technology transfer, is now in many Lexus cars.
|
| Both in appreciation of this technology, as well as
| understanding how haptics can be vital to accessibility, I
| represented IMMR as a member of the W3C WAI [1]. And in that
| role, I went to accessibility conferences. While in college, I
| knew some blind users of screen readers, these conferences were
| my first time being exposed to Braille readers, the software
| and hardware companies behind them, and their large community
| of users. I became personal friends with blind users and
| directly saw how this technology enabled them to be valuable
| contributors to teams and society. Their performance with these
| tools is so impressive.
|
| It's easy to forgot now with Social Media and Politics, but at
| that time of the rise of the Internet, the prevailing spirit
| was that the Internet would connect us all, independent of
| geography, socioeconomics, and disability. Your father's
| groundwork and continuing dedication prevented
| disenfranchisement at a time when things moved very quickly. I
| fear the modern Web may be leaving people behind (I have not
| been close to it for >20 years, so that may be baseless).
|
| I lost my father a few years ago from COVID. While I look at
| pictures and videos, it's really his creations and the people
| whose lives he enriched that I reflect on the most. I never met
| David Holladay, but I have witnessed his impact.
|
| Coming full circle, I recently realized that my current work in
| making Text User Interfaces for finance can improve access to
| users' financial information, via screen reader or braille
| device. Ironically, we are using Braille runes to allow sighted
| people to see graphs in text environments [2]. We will carry
| out this work in memoriam. Amen.
|
| [1] https://www.w3.org/WAI/ [2] This is an example of that:
| https://github.com/mum4k/termdash?tab=readme-ov-file#the-lin...
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