[MD-Sligo] Fwd: FW: [Tech-VI] Remembering Dr. Russell Smith, 20 years on – Mosen At Large

Thu Aug 7 00:40:05 UTC 2025

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From: Terry Powers via MD-Sligo <md-sligo at nfbnet.org>
Date: Wed, Aug 6, 2025 at 10:53 AM
Subject: [MD-Sligo] FW: [Tech-VI] Remembering Dr. Russell Smith, 20 years
on – Mosen At Large
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*From:* tech-vi at groups.io <tech-vi at groups.io> *On Behalf Of *David
Goldfield via groups.io
*Sent:* Tuesday, August 5, 2025 9:53 PM
*To:* tv <tech-vi at groups.io>
*Subject:* [Tech-VI] Remembering Dr. Russell Smith, 20 years on – Mosen At
Large

https://mosen.org/russell/
Remembering Dr. Russell Smith, 20 years on

Jonathan Mosen <https://mosen.org/author/jmosen/>Posted on 06/08/2025
<https://mosen.org/russell/> Posted in Uncategorized
<https://mosen.org/category/uncategorized/>

I don’t know where the time goes. It seems impossible, yet the calendar
doesn’t lie. 20 years ago, Dr. Russell Smith MNZM, CEO of HumanWare, my
friend, my mentor, my then boss, and a man who made the world a better
place for blind people, died tragically aged 61 in a light plane crash
alongside his wife, Marian D’Eve.

They call them “flashbulb moments”, those moments in your life that are so
impactful, you can relive them, play them back, in vivid detail. When I got
the news, I was in the United Sates. The company we had just recently
started calling HumanWare following Pulse Data International’s acquisition
of VisuAide was riding an incredible wave of popularity. Just a little over
a month before, we had stunned the industry by unveiling BrailleNote mPower
without any leaks or build-up. The day we announced it, we were shipping
it, which was and is very rare in the access tech industry. And then, in
the middle of the night, I received that phone call from back in New
Zealand telling me, “Russell and Marian are both dead”.

You do what you have to at times like that. As a senior member of HumanWare
staff, and someone who had many mutual friends with Russell, I was tasked
with making my share of phone calls to people who ought to hear the news
directly. Somehow, you get it done despite the numbness.

So, who was Russell, and why do many of us still miss him so much, 20 years
on?

Born in 1944, Dr. Russell Smith was educated as an electrical engineer, and
earned his Ph.D. in underwater sonar technology from the University of
Canterbury in New Zealand. That may seem like an interesting way to get
into blindness products, but the person we have to thank for that is his
professor, Leslie Kay, who I got to know as a boy. Professor Kay conceived
the groundbreaking idea that sonar technology could be adapted to help
blind people navigate our environment. I was one of the kids chosen for
experiments with Professor Kay’s gadgets, the most useful of which to me
was a sonic headband. I believe it may have been through this work that I
first met Russell.

Following his academic pursuits, the company Russell was working for,
Wormald International, recognized the potential of his work and formed a
new division specifically dedicated to access technology, called Wormald
International Sensory Aids, with Russell at its helm. While its initial
focus was sonic technology including the venerable *Mowat Sensor*, a
handheld device that vibrated to signal nearby objects, Russell had even
bigger dreams.

In 1986, he was responsible for the release of Keynote, a revolutionary
talking computer for blind people. I was one of its first users, meaning I
have been using KeySoft since its very first release.

Russell was an incredibly smart man, a deep and clear thinker who could
understand and get to the core of a problem. He was also smart enough to
surround himself with brilliant people. Russell hired an exceptional
software developer, Jonathan Sharp, who was one of the best UI designers
for blind people in the history of blindness technology. In consultation
with the initial handful of blind people who were Keynote early adopters,
Russell and Jonathan built an intuitive but powerful user interface,
evolving quickly and packed with context sensitive help. I was a high
school kid then, and used to bother both Russell and Jonathan a lot,
telling them all the things I thought they should do with the Keynote to
make it better. They were both incredibly patient with me, and I never felt
like I was being dismissed or talked down to. It was pretty special to come
home from school and find a floppy disk waiting for me in the mail with an
update for my Keynote, with some of my suggestions implemented.

Russell wasn’t only a thinker and an innovator, he had exceptional
entrepreneurial and risk taking instincts. In 1988, he spearheaded a
management buyout of Wormald’s Sensory Aids Division, which led directly to
the founding of Pulse Data International. He had a vision for blindness
technology, and believed in his ability to execute on it, so much so that
he mortgaged his home to finance the company.

The Keynote software eventually made its way to a commercial Toshiba
laptop, allowing users to run KeySoft on top of DOS, then shell out to a
DOS screen reader to get other work done. Ultimately, Pulse Data even
developed its own screen reader, MasterTouch. It offered the option of an
innovative touch tablet, allowing you to feel your screen layout. It also
was able to speak in some applications where other screen readers struggled.

I think it’s fair to say that the Keynote Gold text-to-speech engine was an
acquired taste, but I certainly acquired it. It was responsive and
intelligible at very fast speeds.

But what sent this little company from New Zealand, Pulse Data
International, into the stratosphere, was a product called the BrailleNote,
the first version of which was launched in April 2000. It was intuitive,
attractive, and based on a modern foundation, Windows CE. Microsoft was
delighted to see its operating system deployed on such a device, and at the
official BrailleNote launch, Russell even got to demonstrate the device to
Bill Gates.

The timing couldn’t have been better from a revenue point of view. The US
was, and still is, the BrailleNote’s largest market, and in 2000, the
exchange rate was incredibly favorable for New Zealand companies exporting
product to the US. BrailleNote more than doubled Pulse Data’s turnover.
Pulse Data International won New Zealand exporter of the year twice.
BrailleNote had taken Pulse Data International from an excellent niche
access tech company to a multinational sensation.

I had kept in regular touch with Russell since all the way back in those
early Keynote days. After always showing a genuine interest in how I was
doing and how my career was developing, he’d want to chat about how I
thought things were going, and whether I had any ideas for him. Sometimes
he would make jokes about how I should come and put all these ideas of mine
into action. At least, I thought he was joking. It came as a huge surprise
when Greg Thompson, who was serving as Pulse Data International’s Product
Marketing Manager, started sounding me out about coming to lead their
blindness products. I had never considered product management as a career
option, and the idea of taking over what was then the hottest product in
blindness technology was somewhat daunting. But I’m always up for a
challenge, I loved the idea of helping to influence the direction of such
an iconic product, and I would get to work closely with Jonathan Sharp and
Russell. So in the end, I said I’d give it a go.

I learned a lot from working so closely with Russell, and gained an
appreciation of, and additional admiration for, why he was such a
successful businessman. He was across every aspect of the company with
tremendous attention to detail. He constantly challenged me to adapt my
mindset to the commercial environment I was now in. It wasn’t sufficient
for me to tell him that blind people would benefit from a particular
feature. Need was not enough in a commercial entity. Understandably, he
would want compelling forecasts about how spending precious engineering
time on a feature would translate into increased sales.

Before every major release of KeySoft, Russell would clear out a big chunk
of time in his calendar, and have me show him how to use every new feature
of the software. For the avoidance of doubt, Russell was sighted. He would
ask rigorous, challenging questions, and I say that as the guy who devised
the spec for the product. If he thought a feature should work a particular
way, and I told him the engineers said it wasn’t possible to do it that way
even though I would have preferred it too, he would often respond with
frustration, “how hard can it be?” I soon came to predict accurately when
the next “how hard can it be” was coming.

At first I wondered whether Russell should have had bigger fish to fry.
With the company now so successful and thriving, why did he, as the CEO of
a multinational company, want to know every little quirk of the
BrailleNote? Shouldn’t it have been enough for him to trust his team and
let them deliver a quality product? When I attended my first tech
conference with an exhibit hall as a Pulse Data International employee, I
got my answer. Russell, the CEO, loved getting in the exhibit hall and
taking his turn at the booth. It grounded him. It got him away from the
numbers and the hassle, and connected him to the blind people who were the
meaning of it all. He would love hearing how his products were helping
people succeed, and where people identified weaknesses, he’d write it all
down and make sure I was aware of every comment. Sometimes, I would watch
him chatting to customers, explaining excitedly the latest features. He
never misremembered anything from our briefings, and he rarely needed my
assistance. What he never did was introduce himself as the CEO, the owner
of the company. I’m sure if someone asked him what he did, he would have
told them, but he was just happy to be Russell, a guy showing a blind
person in the exhibit hall the latest cool things. I’m sure there are
countless people from that era who were shown the BrailleNote by the CEO,
and never even knew.

One convention attendee came up to me and said, “you should give that guy
Russell a bonus, he really knows what he’s talking about”.

I loved travelling with Russell. He always worked hard on the plane, I
seldom saw him sleep on those 12 or 13 hour flights, but he was also a fun
and easy-going companion. Several of us who were frequent international
travelers for Pulse Data remember how Russell used to use his considerable
influence due to being such a frequent flyer to organize seat reassignments
so members of his team could sit next to him.

We would regularly travel between New Zealand and the United States, and
Russell’s disappearances into Fry’s Electronics were legendary. He’d always
come out of there with the most extraordinary gadgets, he really was a
gadget guy.

Each month, he would get the team in New Zealand together and tell us about
the numbers. There were regular gifts. Pulse Data deckchairs, backpacks,
one of which I gave to one of my children and I learned is still in regular
use today, all kinds of merch. Sometimes, he would just give you a personal
gift. He might have been in a store somewhere, saw an item that made him
think of you, and purchased it. His kindness and generosity in that way was
incredibly touching and rare.

We kept working away. A mutually beneficial partnership with Baum in
Germany allowed us to launch BrailleNote PK, a robust and portable 18-cell
device. Some of those dinners with the Baum team and ours were legendary.

And the mPower took a lot of careful planning. This was going to be the
company’s next flagship product. Russell trusted my market knowledge, but
he wasn’t afraid to test my assumptions and pose alternative scenarios.

Thanks to a partnership with the Sendero group, GPS technology came for the
first time to a truly portable blindness-specific computer. Russell
completely got Mike May’s vision for portable GPS technology, and he backed
it unreservedly.

While I was at Pulse Data International, which sported a good chunk of
available cash, we explored several mergers and acquisitions, some of
which, had they happened, would have created a very different blindness
technology industry from the one we now know. But the big one that did make
it was of course the acquisition of the Canadian company VisuAide. We
finally completed this in January 2005, just seven months before Russell
died. Looking for a new name for the company, it was finally determined
that since we owned the US company HumanWare, why didn’t we just call the
new company HumanWare. We did, and of course that name continues into the
present.

I remember enjoying a bottle of wine with Russell just after the
acquisition closed, reflecting on how far he had come since he took that
risk and bought out Wormald International Sensory Aids. I told him he must
feel very proud. Russell didn’t spend a lot of time talking himself up, but
he paused for a while and finally said, “yeah, yeah I am actually”. He
deserved to be proud. He had created one of the largest blindness tech
companies in the world, just five years after venture capitalists concluded
that Pulse Data International wasn’t sufficiently consequential to buy.

In July 2005, BrailleNote mPower was out, people were getting used to the
new HumanWare brand, and we were enjoying the juggernaut. It’s an
incredible feeling to be part of that kind of momentum. I worked with some
very smart, dedicated people, all exceptional at what they did, all
thriving under Russell’s leadership. We were good, and we knew we were just
getting started. I was speaking at the ACB convention, while Russell was
on-stage to massive applause at the National Federation of the Blind in
what would be the last speech he would give at a blindness convention. He
was brimming with ideas for the future, and he stated that he looked
forward to being back at the NFB convention in 2006. It felt like we were
unstoppable.

Pulse Data, and then HumanWare, was a New Zealand-based company then. New
Zealand is not a particularly hierarchical country, and Russell had few
airs and graces even by New Zealand standards. So, despite him being the
CEO, if I thought Russell was being foolish, or stubborn, or annoying, I
would tell him so, but in good old colloquial New Zealand language that
would get me fired in many other parts of the world. Russell gave as good
as he got.

One day, me working in the US and Russell back in New Zealand, Russell and
I were having a very lively disagreement via email. Try as I might, I
simply cannot recall what we were fighting about, but it got nicely
colorful. Finally I wrote to him and told him, “Russell, mate, you’re a
good bugger and I don’t want to argue with you anymore. You know I like
working with you.” He wrote back and said something like, “we’re good mate.
You did a good job with the mPower, people loved it at NFB. We make a good
team”.

I’m glad we had that exchange, because it was our last. Please, if you have
someone who you need to put something right with, do it today. We never
know when we will run out of tomorrows. I am so pleased about the
tenderness of our last conversation, but it could so easily have been a
different story.

I miss him. 20 years on, after all this time, I still miss him. It’s not
just the pioneer, the visionary that I miss. I miss the man who was never
too busy to hear the ideas of a kid who was full of product ideas and
absolute certainty in the way only a teenager can convey. I miss the dry,
understated sense of humor. I miss the affection he would show to my kids
when they were little. I miss his compassion which translated one day in
him giving me a huge hug when my marriage at the time was ending, even
though I hadn’t known him to be a hugger before that. Damn it, I just miss
him.

But part of him lives on, because even though he was a quiet, humble,
understated man, he shaped my future, and the futures of many of us,
through his empowering technology. I know those still at HumanWare from
Russell’s time after all these years still aspire to his values.

So, I wanted to tell you this story today, to get my feelings out there,
because it is so important that we always remember Russell Smith, one of
the most wonderful men I ever had the honor to know.

David Goldfield,

Blindness Assistive Technology Specialist

If you need help using your assistive technology learn about my training
services by visiting

WWW.ScreenReaderTraining.com <http://www.screenreadertraining.com/>

Am Yisrael Chai

The Nation of Israel Lives!

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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www.DavidGoldfield.com <http://www.davidgoldfield.com/>

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