David Holladay, blindness technology pioneer, has died

https://www.braillists.org/uncategorised/a-message-from-duxbury-systems-in-loving-memory-of-our-dear-friend-and-colleague/

by sholladay • 2 years ago

175 8 2 years ago

braillists.org

sholladay2• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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.

sholladay2• 2 years ago

You may enjoy the special audio presentation that was included with RDC newsletter #17.

https://www.duxburysystems.org/downloads/library/news/news_1...

The above is essentially a comedy sketch intended to demonstrate the different voice synthesizers that were available at the time. Raised Dot wanted to provide listeners with multiple options to receive the newsletter in their preferred voice. Keep in mind, this was all done painstakingly on tape!

ChrisMarshallNY• 2 years ago

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• 2 years ago

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...

lacker• 2 years ago

Rest in peace David. He was a great human being who helped a lot of others.

acdha• 2 years ago

The Living Blindfully podcast’s latest episode is a remembrance:

https://www.livingblindfully.com/episode-267remembering-blin...

David Holladay, blindness technology pioneer, has died

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