[BlindTlk] Blind Software Engineer

[David Andrews]

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>
>Blind Software Engineer Expanded Access to Braille
><https://gcc02.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsj.com%2Farticles%2Fblind-software-engineer-expanded-access-to-braille-11675868952&data=05%7C01%7CMichael.Graham%40ood.ohio.gov%7Cd54db01794b543fee7da08db0ab65e74%7C50f8fcc494d84f0784eb36ed57c7c8a2%7C0%7C0%7C638115550638331625%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJWIjoiMC4wLjAwMDAiLCJQIjoiV2luMzIiLCJBTiI6Ik1haWwiLCJXVCI6Mn0%3D%7C3000%7C%7C%7C&sdata=nALpzR6NhbszL4rTvhUQOU9GrYYyflk4TTPPZRTanmc%3D&reserved=0>
>The Wall Street Journal | By James R. Hagerty
>PUBLISHED 10:09 AM ET Feb 08, 2023
>
>John J. Boyer, who has died at age 86, produced free, open-source programs
>
>John J. Boyer, raised on a Minnesota farm family with 12 children, was born
>blind and lost most of his hearing by the time he was 10 years old. None of
>that stopped him from setting up a basement science lab and aspiring to be
>another Thomas Edison. What did frustrate him was a lack of textbooks in
>braille. “When I was in high school, my physics book was older than I was
>and didn’t even explain what made the sun hot,” he would later tell the
>Wisconsin State Journal.
>
>He studied mathematics and computer science, learned to live on his own,
>married only to lose his wife to death a few years later, and sank into
>depression. He credited his recovery to counseling and his Roman Catholic
>faith.
>
>Then Mr. Boyer fulfilled what he saw as his duty: He developed Liblouis as
>free, open-source software—now used around the world—to translate text into
>
>braille. ViewPlus Technologies Inc., an Oregon-based maker of equipment used
>to create and format braille documents, commissioned Mr. Boyer to develop
>the software and covered his expenses.
>
>He helped develop BrailleBlaster, an interface that facilitates such tasks
>as creating braille textbooks. That software is made available through the
>American Printing House for the Blind, a nonprofit that serves blind people.
>His software is also used in screen readers allowing people with visual
>impairments to read material displayed on computers.
>
>Mr. Boyer died Jan. 17 at a hospital in Madison, Wis. He was 86 and had been
>under treatment for pneumonia.
>
>“My working relationship with the Lord is that I do what is possible and He
>will do the impossible,” Mr. Boyer said.
>
>John Joseph Boyer, the fifth of the 12 children, was born into a family of
>German descent on July 25, 1936. His father owned a farm-equipment business
>in Wadena, Minn. At a school for blind people, John learned braille. Before
>he was 10, ear infections severely reduced his hearing, and John was
>effectively deaf as well as blind.
>
>As a teenager, he attended a New York school for blind people. Far from
>home, he was lonely at first, he wrote in a brief biography, but found
>consolation in religious studies and a radio and electronics course. He
>graduated in 1956 as the salutatorian of his high school class.
>
>At what is now the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minn., Mr. Boyer
>studied math and psychology and graduated in 1961. “My books were
>transcribed into braille, but they had no graphs of any kind,” he recalled
>later. “Since I was a math major, I had to use my imagination.”
>
>Finding no suitable employment immediately after graduation, he accepted an
>assembly-line job.
>
>Mr. Boyer trained his own guide dog. He designed and built a hearing aid.
>“It was a big box, but it had better features 
>than anything I could afford,”
>he wrote.
>
>He completed a course for blind computer programmers at the University of
>Cincinnati in 1964 and found software jobs in Cleveland and Cincinnati.
>Later, while working as a programmer for the University of
>Wisconsin-Parkside, he met Hazel Mendenhall, a French teacher. They married
>in 1973. She died in 1977 of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
>
>After earning a master’s degree in computer science at the University of
>Wisconsin-Madison, he began work on a doctoral degree and planned a
>dissertation on robotic guide dogs but didn’t complete those studies.
>
>Around the same time, he created a nonprofit, Computers to Help People,
>aimed at enabling people with disabilities to find computer-related work.
>“About 1983, I had also slid into depression, 
>precipitated apparently by the
>failure to find another marriage partner,” he wrote. Counseling in the
>mid-1990s proved helpful, as did his work on software for blind people.
>
>That work was never very lucrative. “He was pretty frugal,” said Sara
>Sandberg, one of his nieces. “He didn’t need 
>a lot.” In his spare time, he
>wrote Christian science-fiction.
>
>In 2012, he went to the White House to receive a Champion of Change award.
>The ceremony was frustrating, he said, because there was no one available to
>use finger spelling to let him know what was being said.
>
>Mr. Boyer’s survivors include two brothers and five sisters.
>
>“To be respected in this society, you have to 
>have a job, and that’s as it
>should be,” he told The Wall Street Journal in 
>1984. “But I know what it’s
>like to be labeled unemployable, and I really want to see other handicapped
>people gainfully employed.”