[Ohio-Talk] Blind Software Engineer

Fri Feb 10 05:01:12 UTC 2023

Thanks for posting this Eric. 

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From: Ohio-Talk <ohio-talk-bounces at nfbnet.org> On Behalf Of Eric Duffy via Ohio-Talk
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Subject: [Ohio-Talk] Blind Software Engineer

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.”

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