Blinded at 14, Chieko Asakawa is now a pioneer in accessibility and how information technology can help it along.
She develops software meant to improve quality of life for the blind and otherwise impaired, such as IBM Home Page Reader, the revolutionary voice-based browser that gave the blind a way online. It became the world’s most widely used web-to-speech system.
Asakawa’s other projects include a braille digital library and a disability simulator designed for sighted webmasters to identify accessibility problems.