Screen reading for everyone

The Australian Broadcasting Company recently ran a TV episode (AD-enabled) and accompanying news article featuring Mick Curran and Jamie Teh, creators of the NVDA screen-reading software for blind and visually-impaired users of Microsoft Windows.

The “Australian Story” episode tells the human side of the story, but as someone involved with Mick and Jamie at a key point in their journey, I thought it might be of interest to at least a few people to know more of what’s behind it.

Briefly, ever since personal computers became popular there’s been a problem of how to make them accessible to people who are blind or otherwise visually impaired—a problem that became especially acute with the advent of window-based UIs like that of the Apple Macintosh or Microsoft Windows. The primary solution proposed was screen-reading software, which did exactly what its name implies: taking text displayed on the computer screen and reading it to the user in a synthesized voice.

Leaving aside the technical issues with screen-reading software products (which in the early days were essentially hacks that hooked into video driver modules), they had a fatal flaw from an economic perspective: more than most software, they took a lot of work to write and (especially) keep up to date with OS and application changes. However, that development cost had to be amortized over a relatively small target user base.

The result was that commercial screen-reading software was (and is) very expensive—so expensive that its cost is typically subsidized in one way or another. This leaves out the vast majority of people in the world who need such software but who can’t afford it themselves, and don’t have a government or an insurer that will help with the cost.

As we entered the twentieth century, multiple trends impacted the small and somewhat isolated industry creating assistive technologies, including most notably the growth of the Internet and the World Wide Web and the increasing population of developers creating free and open source software. After working for a few years as a volunteer in the Mozilla project, in 2005 I went to work for the “new” Mozilla Foundation, after the bulk of the organization was split off to form the for-profit Mozilla Corporation, leaving behind a non-profit rump.¹ One of the first things brought to my attention (by Aaron Leventhal of the accessibility team at IBM) was the opportunity for the Mozilla Foundation to make a significant contribution to the future of accessibility technology, with a focus on open standards and free and open source software.

As a result of conversations with and suggestions from Aaron, the Mozilla Foundation started making some small grants in the area of web accessibility, and went public with that support in March 2006 at one of the premier conferences on assistive technology. That was a pretty successful debut for our efforts, and led to me turning my informal thoughts on what the Mozilla Foundation could do for web accessibility into a more coherent proposal.

Throughout this period we were making some relatively small grants to students and others working on various aspects of web and open source accessibility; for more details, see my reports on Mozilla Foundation grant activities for 2006 and 2007. We also had another successful appearance at the 2007 CSUN accessibility conference.

In the summer of 2007 we made an initial grant to NV Access, the newly formed nonprofit organization created to further develop the NVDA screen reader. We followed up in early 2008 with a larger grant to enable Jamie Teh to work full-time on NVDA.

I can’t remember exactly, but I think that may have been the last major accessibility work funded by the Mozilla Foundation itself. During this time the Mozilla Corporation was putting together its own accessibility team, many of whom were originally funded by the Foundation, and began funding other accessibility work as well. At the end of 2008 Microsoft also made a large grant to NV Access to allow Mick Curran to join Jamie in working on NVDA full-time.

As the last post notes, the Mozilla Foundation can thus best be thought of as providing “seed funding” for NVDA and related accessibility development. It was an investment that paid off handsomely: here we are fifteen years later and NVDA is the number two screenreader in the world, supports a host of different languages, and is used by hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom would never have been able to access the Internet or use PC applications had NVDA not been created.²

So, if you have the time, please consider watching the show about Mick’s and Jamie’s lives and work. If you don’t have the time, but do have the money, please consider donating to NV Access. (Note that the suggested amounts are in Australian dollars, which are currently worth about two-thirds of US dollars.) And if you have neither but are still on Twitter, please consider sharing some of their tweets. Thanks!