· CSUN 101, a quick introduction by Elizabeth Whitaker.
· CSUN 2025, what's new and hot, with Ryan Jones and Roxana Fischer.
· Starting your own business, what matters the most? Some thoughts and stories from Ted Henter.
All this and more on FSCast 256.
OLEG SHEVKUN:
So hello, and welcome to FSCast for March, 2025, the special JAWS 30th anniversary episode. And here with me in our virtual studio is Elizabeth Whitaker. Hi Elizabeth and welcome.
ELIZABETH WHITAKER:
Hi Oleg, and thank you for having me once again.
OLEG:
I have a friend who mentioned something that I should have thought of. He said, "You Americans," (it's kind of funny to hear because I'm not an American), he says, "You Americans are talking about CSUN as if everybody knows what it is." So how about if I ask you some of those basic CSUN questions for an introduction, is that okay with you?
ELIZABETH:
Absolutely.
OLEG:
So, I understand that CSUN is geared mainly to AT professionals, rather than end users. But where does it happen, is that on campus or what's the venue?
ELIZABETH:
So CSUN has been at several venues over the years, currently for the last several years it's been at the Anaheim Marriott in Anaheim, California. CSUN stands for California State University Northridge, that's who hosts the conference.
OLEG:
But you're not on university campus, you're on the Marriott premises, that’s a large hotel.
ELIZABETH:
Yes, correct.
OLEG:
Am I correct in thinking it's not just about blindness and low vision?
ELIZABETH:
Correct. It's all assistive technology, you have all these different presentations, you get to learn about new equipment, you get to network with people from other companies, and then you get to go to the booths and you get to actually see the equipment in action.
OLEG:
How do you find your location, are there sighted guides available, or how does that work?
ELIZABETH:
Yeah, so every year, GoodMaps, which is a company that produces outdoor and indoor maps, mapping systems, will set up at CSUN, and you will have the option to navigate using the app. But then there are just people who will help you. And if you want to know where another booth is, for example, you can ask someone where that booth is located. You get a lot of information when you get to CSUN, so you can choose whether you want that information in print, on a thumb drive or in braille. And it gives you the lay of the land, it tells you where all the booths are, you can look up a specific company, for example, and say, "oh, okay, that's booth 158. Great." And then you go find it.
OLEG:
I admit I am probably a bit confused here, because I'm hearing about presentations, I am hearing about the booths, and while recording the interview with Ryan and Roxana that's coming up later in the episode, I heard about the suite. Are there three different venues, or am I just totally confused here?
ELIZABETH:
It is laid out a little bit like that, in the sense that you have a suite, which is where you can gather to meet with people if you want to have a meeting with someone from other companies and things like that. You have the rooms where the presentations take place, for example, ours, a lot of them take place in platinum five. And so those are just conference rooms in the hotel. And then you have the exhibit hall, which is one really big area where all the booths are located
OLEG:
For the presentations, how many of them are happening at the same time? And do you repeat them? If I want to go to two places at once, I definitely cannot do it, but will there be two instances, two repeats of the same presentation?
ELIZABETH:
Unfortunately you don't repeat the presentation. And I'm not sure how many exactly happen concurrently, but there are multiple presentations going on at any given time. Fortunately though, a lot of people will make their presentations available on the CSUN website , so you can go look them up. And if you're not going to be able to make a certain presentation, you can look that presentation up or you can go meet with that company.
OLEG:
To you personally, what were some of the highlights there?
ELIZABETH:
It's hard to choose highlights sometimes because there's so much, but I would say just all of the information surrounding braille displays. And then we did talk to a company called Innosearch, and we're actually going to do a webinar in May on their product, which is a website where you can go search for and purchase products from all different companies, for example, Amazon, you can also go buy plane tickets there. So it's an easy way to find a wide variety of products. So we're going to be talking more about that in May. We'll be posting that information very soon. But we did get to visit with them and learn more about their product, so that was great.
OLEG:
Have you been working at the booth, or was it just presentations that you were doing?
ELIZABETH:
I did both actually. I did get the opportunity this year to spend a good amount of time at the booth where we got to demonstrate JAWS, ZoomText and Fusion, features like FS Companion, Picture Smart AI, even our training materials. So we got to meet a wide variety of people, from those who were just learning JAWS to seasoned JAWS users, to teachers or people who have fellow employees who use JAWS and they want to help make their workplace more accessible. Again, it's just a great experience and it's a lot of fun to get to talk to everyone.
OLEG:
A bit of a personal question, do people recognize your voice, do they say, "Oh, yeah, you are the Elizabeth from training," and so on?
ELIZABETH:
We do get recognized some, yes, which is fun.
OLEG:
What's the main thing you get out of CSUN when you go there, is there something motivating, is there a wow factor there? Is there something that would, so suppose you would not be working for Vispero, working for a company that sends you there, is there something that would still make you at least want to go there?
ELIZABETH:
I would say, just the ability to see so much technology in one place and have all those presentations to learn about it. And then be able to go watch someone demo it and put your hands on it, that to me is so valuable.
OLEG:
CSUN, the world's largest assistive technology, adaptive technology, access technology, whatever, AT show and conference of the year. That's really cool. And thanks for giving us a CSUN 101 introduction.
And of course there was a large group of people from Vispero at CSUN this year. And we go on to Ryan Jones and Roxana Fischer.
OLEG:
Here in our virtual studio, we're happy to welcome Ryan Jones and Roxana Fischer. Ryan is one of our vice presidents and Roxana is one and only product manager for JAWS and quite a few other things. Roxana, Ryan, welcome to FSCast.
RYAN JONES:
Thanks Oleg, appreciate you letting us be here today.
ROXANA FISCHER:
Yeah, thank you for having us.
OLEG:
It's a privilege. Now talk to me about CSUN, your impressions, what you saw, what stood out to you?
RYAN:
A couple of things. So I've been going to CSUN now for off and on over the last 20 years, I'd say I've probably been to 15 or so. And this one I think was the most energetic CSUN that I've been to, especially from the point of Freedom Scientific and Vispero. And I think that really revolves around the 30th anniversary of JAWS that we're celebrating, which I know we'll be talking about some today and throughout the course of 2025.
And so we had a lot of great things going on around that, which we'll mention. But I would just say an overall impression was the conference is definitely back after a time of Covid and it was remote for a while and then it took a few years to get attendance back. So definitely a lot of people there, a lot of energy. And like I said, for me it was the most exciting one that I've been to.
ROXANA:
Yeah, I can mostly echo that. It's really back to normal. It's my third season and I really saw it growing now after Covid. We had multiple presentation sessions where they had to close the door and all seats were taken so no one could join anymore. So that was really exciting to see.
OLEG:
How about the presentation that the two of you did?
RYAN:
Yeah, Roxana and I did one on what's new and coming up with JAWS and ZoomText. That's always a really popular one. But it was standing room only. They had to stop letting people in. And it was a great session. We got to share some of the amazing things that have been happening in our software over the past year. Especially we focused in on Picture Smart AI, FS Companion Live Text View and ZoomText and a number of things.
But to me, one of the really cool parts was at the beginning of our session, which was on Wednesday morning, Sharky, the shark mascot, made his grand entrance to CSUN. And Sharky was there to celebrate with us the 30th anniversary of JAWS. And Sharky is a seven-foot tall shark where there's actually a person inside of the costume. It's an inflatable costume. You can't really tell there's a person inside. But Sharky made lots of visits at different times around CSUN. But Sharky made a grand entrance into our session, came up on stage. Roxana and I high fived Sharky, took a picture with him. So that was fun. It was a lot of energy in the room and just a way to really kick off the celebration for us of 30 years of the screen reader that's changed many of our lives.
OLEG:
I have to ask, Roxana, isn't that a bit scary though, a handshake with a shark or Sharky, I mean, visually, how does that look, I mean, to me it would be if not scary, then spooky at least?
ROXANA:
No, it's actually a really cute costume, so I wasn't that scared.
RYAN:
Yeah, this Sharky is friendly, seven feet tall. One thing that we had in our suite area at CSUN where we did our presentations is we had a timeline up on the wall of the last 30 years of innovations with JAWS. So we went back and looked since 1995 when JAWS for Windows was first released and we identified one thing each year that was significant to the blindness and low vision community that was released with our software. And we had a visual timeline up on the wall showing 30 innovations that have happened. And we also of course have a virtual representation of that for people who won't be able to be there in person at different shows this year. And of course for those of us who use JAWS and aren't able to see the timeline. We have an online representation of that that has all 30 years and the different innovations. We have it in video form as well. So there's a video on YouTube you can watch. And I think we can share the link with everyone to where that timeline is. And it's a great way to go stroll down memory lane.
It was fun when we were working on this because I remember most of these innovations, I've been using JAWS for 25 years myself, but I've forgotten what year some of them came out. And so we had to go back in our archives and look up, well, when exactly did Text Analyzer come out or JAWS Tandem, for example. So it was a great project to build this. And we hope people will go take a look at this throughout the year. So that was definitely one thing that we released this week in conjunction with CSUN.
OLEG:
And it is available online at vispero.com/JAWS-timeline, and we'll leave the link in the description of this episode. And how about JAWS or Insert J Club?
RYAN:
Yeah, the Insert J Club we also released this week at CSUN in mid-March. And the goal of the Insert J Club, and of course Oleg, you've been a JAWS user for a long time, and Roxana knows this as well, INSERT+J of course is the keyboard command that brings up the JAWS window. So if you want to bring up either the context menu for JAWS or the JAWS window, you press INSERT+J. So we thought that was a cool name to tie us into the product.
But it's an online community that we're building. There's no cost to join. Once someone signs up, all we ask for is your name and email address and what country you live in. And throughout the year we'll do various events with the folks that are signed up for the Insert J Club. So we'll have exclusive content that we're going to push out to the group. We'll have some special trainings that our training team with Elizabeth and Rachel may do. We will have some online meetups with the group. We may even have some in-person meetups at various conventions throughout the year. So folks will stay tuned to their email when they sign up. We've got a number of things, some I haven't even listed yet that we will do with this group. And it's just a way to stay engaged with us. One to two days before every software release, we will give that group early access to the what's new information about what's coming out in the software release. So by signing up for the club, you will know what's coming out a couple of days before the rest of the world knows as far as what's coming up in JAWS, ZoomText or Fusion.
So we've had a really great response. We've had hundreds and hundreds of people already sign up for it. So I'm looking forward to starting to interact with this group over the coming months and years. And just looking forward to a nice vibrant community where we're connected more with people that are using our products.
And to learn more about it and to sign up for the Insert J Club, you can go tofreedomscientific.com/insertjclub.
OLEG:
But let me make it quite clear, it's not only for JAWS, it's for ZoomText, it's for Fusion.
RYAN:
Yep, it's for everyone. Insert J is the most notable keystroke, but we absolutely want people there who are using ZoomText Fusion and all of our software for that matter.
And Roxana, we had some really cool things that we were giving out at the conventions this year, some memorabilia, and we're going to have some of these things at some of the other shows that we'll be at throughout the year, and I think you might be best suited to describe what some of these look like.
ROXANA:
Yeah, definitely. It's actually a hint towards how JAWS came out 30 years ago. It's a floppy disk with some braille code on it that also says JAWS 30 years. And yeah, it's pretty cool. I wonder if any of our listeners still has one of the floppy disks at home.
OLEG:
So you actually gave out floppy disks, or is that a memorabilia designed as a floppy disk?
ROXANA:
No, it's a design. So the floppy disks are actually pins or stickers. So if you have them as stickers, then you cannot feel the braille. But we also had them as pins, and there you can really nicely read the braille code as well.
RYAN:
Some people listening are saying, what's a floppy disk? It's maybe a little ... anybody that's younger is definitely saying I don't really know what that is. So it was fun giving out the pins and the stickers because it was taking people down memory lane of, "Oh yeah, I remember a floppy disk." I had, me, I had personally forgotten that one corner of the floppy disk is not square, it's an angle. And that's how you could orient the floppy disk to insert it into the disk drive the right way. But I mean, I was used to that obviously when I used floppy disks, but I had forgotten that. So it was fun to feel the tactile representation of a floppy disk again.
OLEG:
Yeah, and there was also a tab on the floppy disk that you could move to write protect the disk or unprotect the disc.
RYAN:
Yes, that's right.
OLEG:
A totally mechanical device right there. Now, one thing we're hearing is that there was more than one company, there were three or even four companies showing multi-line braille displays. Is there anything in the works in terms of cooperation with those companies like HumanWare, APH with the Monarch and others, that there'll be something that JAWS users could be looking forward to?
ROXANA:
Yeah, multi-line was definitely a big topic at CSUN. We saw multiple vendors that you listed like Monarch, NewHaptics, DotPad, as well as Orbit Reader, which has been on the market for a while.
OLEG:
So there are four companies. Okay.
ROXANA:
Yeah, there are four companies. And we see two of them actually showed already the solution how it could look with JAWS. So we are getting to it, it's currently still a demo, but there's something coming that makes it exciting and showcase that it works with screen reader integration as well. We focus on the multi-line approach first before going to the graphical system that they also can display. However, it's quite exciting to see these things coming alive. And obviously we support our braille partners doing the development.
OLEG:
We are really focusing on our FSCompanion. Are you getting any feedback on that? And especially the latest changes, we've added the Dictate button where you can go tofscompanion.ai, or you can bring up FSCompanion from JAWS by pressing INSERT+SPACE followed by F1. And if you're using a Windows device, there'll be the Dictate button. Or you can actually press ALT+SHIFT+D to press the Dictate button with a keyboard. And ALT+SHIFT+D will then release that button. You can ask your question, that'll be filled out for you, and you simply press Send then. Are you hearing back from people at CSUN and people that you are talking to about the usefulness of that feature?
ROXANA:
Definitely. We have multiple channels to hear feedback from our customers about Picture Smart, but also FS Companion. And one of the early requests that came up after we just introduced it is like, please, please also let me enter voice dictation or some questions that I just say them and then we get the answer back and maybe even integrate it further with a voice assistant. So for now, we started with providing the dictation so that it's easier to enter your question instead of just typing.
RYAN:
One of the unique things that we have at Vispero is, we're coming at the problem of accessibility from the user side with our assistive technology, and also from the digital accessibility side with our enterprise tools such as the ARC platform for automated scanning of websites and digital assets. And also the JAWS for Kiosk software where we can help companies make their self-service devices accessible. And then also our JAWS Inspect product, which helps testers better understand the screen reader experience even if they are not screen reader users themselves. So we can tackle the problem from both sides, which is something no other company can do. And that's one thing I love about the different products and different groups that we have at Vispero. But I think one neat thing, and I'll let Roxana add a little bit more to this, is she's the product manager for JAWS Inspect, with JAWS Inspect, we've also given JAWS Inspect users access to FS Companion, which is of course trained on JAWS and documentation for things around JAWS or ZoomText/Fusion, Microsoft Office, but it understands why JAWS behaves the way it does.
And so we're seeing some really neat use cases now for testers to be able to go ask questions to FS Companion about why JAWS does what it does. And it's giving them really useful responses. Roxana, do you want to share a little bit more?
ROXANA:
Exactly. When we developed FS Companion, we also saw how useful it is to actually learn JAWS. And for whom else is this important? For our JAWS Inspect users who are reviewing applications and websites from a visual standpoint and how JAWS interacts with it, and to create a report. So often for people who are getting into it, they have questions like, why is the navigation different with JAWS? Why do I need to communicate that it is a heading? What is the benefit of this different style of communication? And FS Companion really provides neat answers to why these are important. We need them for navigation, we need them for additional clarity. But also exploring actually the limitations that it brings. So that you need to review it linearly or use quick navigations to get to a location that you want to review. So yeah, definitely try it out.
OLEG:
Later on this episode, Ted Henter will be telling us about how JAWS pushed the boundaries back in 1995. I'm really happy to state that we keep pushing the boundaries in 2025. Ryan, Roxana, thanks for being on the show. And thanks for doing what you're doing.
Ryan:
Thank you, Oleg. Thank you to our listeners as well for celebrating 30 years of JAWS for Windows. And we look forward to the next 30 years.
ROXANA:
Thank you for having us.
Oleg:
Here's a message from Marinela Ortiz from Florida, and she writes about both JAWS and braille:
“As a JAWS and Braille user, I found them both very helpful ever since I got my first laptop in 2009. I didn't start learning JAWS until early 2010 when I was noticing I couldn't see the screen anymore. I was trained at The Lighthouse in Orlando and I was also starting my college studies for the bachelor's degree. I did struggle with my first few college classes since I was getting used to using a screen reader. And then later I tried bringing my Perkins brailler to class and did have a professor who got annoyed at me for using it. I was then really glad to have been introduced to braille display and note-taker technology. It helped me through the rest of my bachelor's degree. And then I also got my master's using braille displays with JAWS for Windows and VoiceOver on the Mac.
I admit it makes me sad that people would think that braille is obsolete when it's not. It has helped me regain confidence when I was thought to be illiterate at one college I had attempted my master's at and had to leave. However, the rejection did not keep me down. I applied to a different college to get my master's and graduated with it in 2023.
I mostly used JAWS with to do assignments and also used my Mac with a different braille display for projects I had to do at the end of the semester. I feel that Louis Braille would be really proud with what we've done with his system of dots, including the realm of technology.”
Well, thank you Marinela for sharing your story. And if you would like to share a JAWS story with us, please email to fscast@vispero.Com.
So on this special JAWS 30th anniversary issue of FSCast, we have Ted Henter. Ted, welcome to our virtual studio.
TED:
Thank you, Oleg, it's great to be here.
OLEG:
We were messaging with somebody whom you know quite well, Glen Gordon, and he said, "If not for Ted, none of us would have had a chance to contribute." Agree or disagree?
TED:
Well, that's stretching the truth a little bit I think. It's true that I did hire Glen and other people. But I'm sure a guy like Glen would have been able to contribute no matter what, even if it wasn't for me. But I did hire Glen, I did hire Eric, and I hired Jerry Bowman and Carl Wise. And there was a lot of people involved, not just me. But Glen was one of the key people, the key person in JAWS for Windows.
OLEG:
Another piece of feedback that we got, it's funny that you had mention Eric at this point, when we started promoting JAWS 30th anniversary, Eric wrote, "No, that's not right, it's JAWS for Windows." Because actually JAWS started in 1989. Do you see lots of difference between JAWS for DOS and JAWS for Windows, or would you see JAWS for Windows as the development of the previous product?
TED:
We purposely tried to keep the user interface the same, we wanted to keep let's say the numeric pad the same, we called it the Speechpad, and the dual cursor design, the macros (now known as scripts) and using the JAWS key to multiply the number of keyboard functions. So we transported all those ideas from JAWS for DOS.
OLEG:
But that idea of keeping the interface would not have been that obvious when you all started, because the general perception was that Windows is going to be radically different. Was that a challenge for you, especially, if I understand this correctly, with little support from Microsoft at that point?
TED:
Yeah, it was very difficult for me to grasp, what does that screen look like? And Glen had the same problem. But we would both try and work out how are we going to do this screen with the menus and the different windows. We could have three, four, or five different windows open at the same time. How is that going to work? And as time went on, we developed the off-screen model, and that was the real key. Each window was just like a JAWS for DOS screen with the arrow keys, you can move up, down, left, right, page up, page down, all that sort of stuff. So we purposely tried to make it work the same way JAWS for DOS did.
Now JAWS for DOS, of course you had, what was it, 80 columns and 24 rows, and they're all in line. Whereas when you get to Windows, none of those things were in line. So we had to make some guesses as to how to do that. And Glen came up with the virtual screen. So there was a lot of guessing going on, and there was a lot of decisions that we made. And we were able to do that in time.
OLEG:
I remember reading some very outstanding people in the field of assistive technology back in early nineties, that blindness access or access for blind people to graphical user interfaces is just impossible. So it's like trying to solve a puzzle that does not have a solution. Was there that sentiment in the air, did you ever hear that back in '92 or '93?
TED:
Oh yeah. Yeah, I was working for Deane Blazie in the late eighties. And he went to a show somewhere and he saw the Macintosh. And he came back and said to me, "I don't know how we're going to make that thing talk." And of course I wasn't concerned about that, the Macintosh. And I wasn't concerned at all about the GUI, the graphical user interface, until it became obvious that Windows was going that way. And yeah, there was some very smart people involved. IBM had Jim Thatcher and another fellow, I can't remember his name, so we learned a bit from them. The guys at Berkeley Systems, Peter Korn, they got the Macintosh to talk.
OLEG:
OutSpoken product.
TED:
Yeah. And then David Kostyshyn up in Canada, he had a talking Windows. The Outspoken was a totally different concept than what we were used to with JAWS. They were hitting a key to move the mouse around. When they demonstrated to us, there wasn't a next word function, you just had to hunt around for the next word. I didn't like that concept. We were so used to using JAWS for DOS, and it was so easy to read around the screen. And Glen and I made the decision that that's what we wanted with our Windows product. And Glen made it happen. And a couple other people were involved in that too. Chuck Opperman was working on the offscreen model in the beginning, but he didn't finish it. He went to work for Microsoft. So Glen took over.
At that point in time, in the early nineties, you had to hack into Windows, for example, to intercept the keyboard because you wanted to get the keyboard keys before you sent it onto the operating system. So you had to hack into that. And then you had to hack into the routine that takes the data that's in memory, the data that's on the screen, and it takes it from internal memory, runs through the routine, and that puts it up on the visual screen, but only as a series of dots. There's no ASCII characters up on the screen. So that had to be intercepted. And the only way to intercept that routine was to hack into it.
And Microsoft wasn't so happy about that because a lot of their major users didn't want anybody hacking into their operating system. So they came out with Windows NT, which made hacking almost impossible. But at that point, they were talking to us about that, and they provided routines to where we could get that data without hacking into it.
OLEG:
This is funny because now when we think of keyloggers, we think of malware to intercept your transactions in a bank or something. But it turns out you guys wrote one of the earlier keyloggers for very different purposes.
TED:
Yeah. With the screen reader, you have to get the keys first. Let's say for example, UpArrow. Well, JAWS would get a keystroke, the keyboard interrupt, and then it would look at the key and figure out that means an UpArrow was pressed. And then I think it would put our code up on the stack and send along that first code to Windows. Windows would move the cursor, and then the control would come back to JAWS, and then JAWS would read that line that it got moved to. So you have to wait for the operating system or the application to move the cursor in order to read it effectively.
OLEG:
But wasn't that making things, first, a bit unsecure, second, a bit unstable, and third, a bit slow. You're introducing another element, another variable into the system, which makes the system prone to crashes. And you're not introducing just one variable, you're doing many of them.
TED:
Very true, Oleg. When we first announced JAWS for Windows was available, it would run for about six or seven hours if you're lucky, and then it would crash, have to reboot. So we definitely had instability issues. When the Social Security Administration said they wanted Windows NT, well, Glen got that working thanks to some help from Microsoft, and I would be up at the Social Security building writing macros for their screens and it would crash very frequently. And when it crashed, I'd report back to Glen. And Glen would get to work trying to figure out why it crashed. It was crashing a lot. But eventually, we stayed on it.
OLEG:
For me to understand, you were at a customer's premises, and a very important customer's premises at that, and your product crashed and the customer did not throw you out. Why?
TED:
Well, I made it clear that we're not delivering this product, we still need to do some work on it, and I'm here to write the scripts to make it easy for your people to read the screen. This was Social Security Administration. There was about 700 blind people working there. So it was a big sale for us. But we had to get it right. And so yeah, I spent a week there in Baltimore at their building working on their screens with DecTalk and JAWS for Windows, a very early version JAWS for Windows NT. Those are the kind of things we had to go through. And there was definitely crashes. I remember January of 1995, we advertised a training session for JAWS for Windows at our location in St. Petersburg, and we had about 20 people come in there, mostly tech people from the various states, counselors and tech people that had to make the decisions on what to buy.
OLEG:
They were not blind people, they were sighted decision makers, right?
TED:
Well, I would say half of them were blind and half of them were sighted, but they were all decision makers or influencers. And yeah, we had 25 computers set up that we rented. We rented 25 computers, put JAWS on there. Did the best we could to test them, but invariably, one or two computers would crash during the training session. That sounds like a pretty sketchy product, but it was the best there was at that point in time. All those people, they were there that day, they ended up recommending our product. It was a very stressful time, I can tell you that.
OLEG:
When a company hires potential employees like developers today, they would want experience on the resume. Back in 1993 or '94, you could not have asked for three years of Windows screen reader development experience because there would be no people in the world to qualify. How did you grow your talent?
TED:
Initially with JAWS for DOS, I hired Greg Skipper right out of college, and I told him, explained to him what we wanted and how we were going to do it in DOS. And then after a couple of years, he decided to go to work for the city of St. Pete. And we hired Chuck Oppermann. He was a real Microsoft fanatic, he just loved Microsoft, but they weren't hiring. So he came to work for us and he got to work on JAWS for Windows.
I showed him JAWS for DOS, this was what we want. We got to get the ASCII characters inside there and then figure out which ones are visible on the screen. And so there was a lot of learning there. And Chuck caught on right away.
I also hired two consultants, and they came in, and I explained to their boss, "Look, we know this is difficult, we know it's going to be very hard to do, and I'm not going to pay you just so you can tell me in two weeks that you can't do it. I'm letting you know that if you can do it, I will certainly pay you, but if you can't do it, I'm not going to pay you to learn on that." And so sure enough, two weeks later, they quit, saying, "No, we can't do it, this is too difficult."
And then Chuck got an offer from Microsoft, and Microsoft called me and said, "We want to hire Chuck. What do we have to do?" And so then I'd been talking to Glen about coming to work for us. And he was working for us part-time, he kept his real job. And when Microsoft came to get Chuck, I knew that that was what Chuck wanted, that was his dream job working for Microsoft. So I didn't argue with him. We had a non-compete with Chuck, but I didn't demand anything from Microsoft. I just told them, "Okay, I know that's what Chuck wants, I'm not going to stand in his way, so you can have Chuck."
And then I went after Glen. And I tried to get him to come to work for us full-time.
OLEG:
Do you remember what he was doing at the time?
TED:
He was working at UCLA.
OLEG:
As a programmer?
TED:
Yeah, as a programmer. And I remember talking to him at one of the CSUN meetings, we had dinner together. And Glen asked me, "You think we can make any money in this screen reader business?" I said, "Well, I don't know, but we're sure going to try." And lucky for me, Glen decided to come to work for us full-time. Still living in LA at that point. So he was working remote. There was a whole bunch of stuff going on then.
OLEG:
Now in those early years, competition was already starting, were you seen as the bully by some of those competitors?
TED:
I don't know. I really don't know. I never thought of ourselves as the bully. I do realize we were one of the more popular screen readers. I think there was a time we had 70% or 80% of the market. But I don't recall any real arguments. Well, maybe there was one. There was this thing called the Dueling Windows, and that's when they put six or seven of us developers up there on stage and gave us tasks to do with a monitor facing the audience. And so one time I got kicked off the stage because I was practicing. I heard him say, "You got to do this." So I set about learning how to do it on my computer while the test was being done on somebody else's computer. And that wasn't quite kosher. The audience pointed out to the master of ceremonies that I was cheating, so I got kicked off the stage. And Glen came up and finished it. That was just one of the things. I didn't think I was cheating, but everybody else did.
OLEG:
Well, now that you mention Dueling Windows, that was a very popular CSUN event for a few years, and there were some rumors that you had the tasks in advance so you did have the time to prepare. Yes or no?
TED:
Yes and no. I think there was three Dueling Windows. I'm sure that at least on two of them we didn't have the assignment ahead of time, we didn't know exactly what would be done. And then maybe the third one we did know ahead of time.
But for example, we did know the pretty obvious thing in Word was to use the file open dialog to load up a file. And there was a big problem there, the screen readers couldn't handle it. So we figured that was going to be one of the tests. So Glen set to work on it, and Glen fixed that problem. It was a bug in our software. But something weird that Microsoft had done in a file open dialog. So we were confident that we were the only screen reader that would be able to open a file using the File Open dialog. And I demonstrated that.
And then the OutSpoken guy, Josh Mealy, very smart young man, and he just went to Windows Explorer and found the file in question and clicked on it. As you know, that will also load it up into Word if it's a .doc file. So he really shined in that one. See, and they didn't pick out any winners, but Josh showed up a lot of people that day, including me.
Later on that day, I was walking past the Outspoken booth, and I asked if Josh was there. And I talked to him briefly and I asked him if he wanted a job. He said no. But he did quite well for himself, even without working for us.
Back to your question, yeah, some of the stuff we knew ahead of time. And ahead of time might be a day or maybe a couple of minutes. I remember getting up early one day, the day of the contest, and writing some scripts at the last minute. And then Eric Damery came to my room and said, "Hey, we got to go." So he and I went down and got things set up.
So we worked right up to the last minute because we're still developing on two tracks, Glen was taking care of the heart of the product, the basic JAWS stuff. And then I and eventually other people were writing the scripts, which really made JAWS work well. And so there was a lot of work going on, especially getting ready for Dueling Windows.
Even when we didn't know what the task would be ahead of time, we picked a couple of obvious ones, like the File Open dialogue, browsing the web using Windows Explorer. It was exciting times, but also very stressful times because the room would have probably a hundred or more people in it, again, these decision makers, people that are going to decide which program gets bought for their clients. So it was very important to each of us developers that we did well in that situation.
OLEG:
I'm hearing you telling me several times, hey, we found this bright person, we hired this bright person, we gave this guy a job, and he wouldn't do it, and he couldn't do it in two weeks, so we had to let him go and so on. On the one hand, if you don't trust your talent, if you don't trust your people, you're not going to develop. Your entry level bar is going to be too high. And many of the people, key people who could have learned, you will not be able to take them in. But on the other hand, your strategy, if I'm hearing it correctly, would also lead to some major disappointments. I mean, you would get people, you would invest into their development, into their training and so on, and then you would be disappointed because the doors are open wide. Is that something you also experienced? And is disappointment a "normal part" of pioneering software development projects?
TED:
I think it is a normal part. If you're going to be an entrepreneur in a very small company, you just have to make the hard decisions sometimes. And talented people like Rex and Chuck, they come along and they get a better job, you got to let them go, not much you can do.
OLEG:
By default, do you tend to trust people or do you tend to doubt?
TED:
I trust people, and sometimes I get burnt, but 80% of the time it turns out to be a good decision. Number one, you have to have good instincts. And number two, you have to have good people helping you make these decisions, like Jerry Bowman. Jerry was a human resources guy at Honeywell and AT&T and a couple of other big companies. And he was retired when I met him. He came to work for us for free. And he was the main guy that did the hiring and the firing.
Of course, if we had somebody walk in the door and wanted a job, like Eric, Jerry would interview him, and then I would interview him, and then Jerry and I would talk about it, and we decided to hire Eric. And similar with Glen. I wanted Glen because I knew him for a couple of years before he came to work for us, because he was a customer of Maryland Computer Services when I worked there. And I was doing tech support for the product he was using at UCLA. So I knew he was a smart guy, and we became very friendly. We were both blind, we both needed to use a computer. So I wanted him to work for us. And Jerry confirmed that position.
So Jerry and I worked together as a very good team when it came to hiring people, and firing people. And Henter Joyce went from four people, myself, a programmer and my wife to manage the office and her sister, Sue, to help out. We went from that to about 70 people in 13 years. To grow like that, you've got to make risk and you got to make good decisions, and it all worked out, thank God.
OLEG:
That growth, was that at some point more than you cared to handle?
TED:
No, it was quite thrilling actually. The scary part was when we were just barely scraping by, just barely making it. Yeah, that was the early years. That was the first seven or eight years. And when JAWS for Windows hit six months later, we really started making a lot of sales. So that was the key.
One thing I didn't mention though yet is Bill Joyce. Bill Joyce is a blind guy that I met. After I lost my job at Maryland Computer Services because they went out of business, I was training people. I went to Chicago to train Bill. He was blind. He had a lot of money. And after about a year of that going on, trying to train him to use talking computers, because he was not only blind but he was partially deaf. So he had a hard time learning talking computers.
And he said to me, "Hey, let's start a company." I said, "Okay, but I don't have any money." He said, "Don't worry about that I'll pay the bills, you run the company." So that was Bill Joyce. And he did that for about three years. And so that really got us going. And my wife and I bought him out in 1990. And by then we had enough JAWS for DOS sales to keep our head above water, but just barely. So there were some very iffy times.
OLEG:
And you were able to both develop software, develop scripts, and run the company, I mean, these seem to be two very different tasks?
TED:
I was doing tech support too.
OLEG:
Task number three.
TED:
Well, you got to do that in a small company. Like for example, Chuck Oppermann, I didn't want him doing tech support, he wasn't blind. It was better to focus his talents on developing the software. And even later on as we hired more people to do tech support, first you got to train them up real good. You got to supervise them to make sure they're doing it good. But we were very fortunate in that way. We focused on hiring very hard-working, intelligent, blind people. So we were very fortunate. We had about 30 blind people working there by that time I sold the company. There's a lot more now.
So you have to put some trust in the people that you are working with and do whatever you can to help them and support them. And then you have to be able to recognize when it's time to let them go. When I first met this guy, Jerry Bowman, we had about eight people working at the company, and we just weren't doing very well. And I happened to be talking to Jerry one day, and I explained to him my problems. So he offered to come in and interview everybody and give me some advice for free. I said okay. He did that. He recommended we fire four people.
OLEG:
Four out of eight?
TED:
Four out of eight, yeah. And I agreed, and we had to let those people go. And then with Jerry's help, we set about hiring new people. So he was a very key part of the company. You don't make a product like JAWS for Windows and support hundreds of thousands of people without a lot of help. You got to hire good people.
ELIZABETH:
Wow, Oleg, what a great interview with Ted, so interesting. I actually got the opportunity to meet him a few years ago at a National Federation of the Blind conference in New Orleans actually in 2022. So it was great getting to meet him and talk to him for just a few minutes about JAWS and how everything began.
OLEG:
What was it like there, I mean, how do you meet Ted Henter at an NFB convention? I mean, did you just shout out, "Hey Ted, I want to see you?" Or was that like an event or how does it work?
ELIZABETH:
In this case, Eric Damery was getting ready to retire, and Ted was there at his reception. And so we just went over and Eric introduced me to him.
OLEG:
How did he impress you?
ELIZABETH:
He was very nice and very open to talking about JAWS. And we talked a little bit about when I started using JAWS. And just getting to talk to him about the product and how it's evolved over the years was just a great moment.
OLEG:
And I've had a privilege of knowing Ted since 1996, and he's always been a people person. I mean, today in this part one of the interview, and also in part two that we'll be playing next month because we couldn't fit it all on one FSCast episode, so I thought he would be talking about JAWS features, but he's talking about people, and this is what motivates me. The right people will create good features, but the features will never create people. So that was a very, very good reminder for me just doing and hearing this interview.
And by the way, talking about people and features and training, I understand that the training schedule for April is still in the making, but is there at least one highlight that you could talk about today?
ELIZABETH:
Absolutely. So back in February we did a webinar on the new Outlook with JAWS, and it was very well attended. We had over 500 people at that webinar. And so a lot of hot topics surrounding the new Outlook. So we're going to do another one in April on the 17th, that's Thursday, April 17th at noon Eastern. We're going to be covering some more new Outlook topics. So visit freedomscientific.com/training/freewebinars, and you'll find all the information right there. And you can register.
OLEG:
Is that sort of part two or is that a rerun of a previously done seminar or webinar?
ELIZABETH:
No, we're going to be delving into certain features more. The first one was just an introduction where people could just learn about how to navigate, and for example, navigate your mail, create new mail, navigate the calendar. Now we're really going to dive into a lot of these features and get down to how to use them.
OLEG:
And for more information on our training events, just go tofreedomscientific.com/training. And if you have any training related questions or suggestions, you can write to training@vispero.Com.
ELIZABETH:
And for FSCast related questions, write to fscast@vispero.Com.
OLEG:
And on that note, we've come to the end of our March, 2025 issue of FSCast. And we are Elizabeth Whitaker and Oleg Shevkun, on behalf of all of us here at Vispero, have a good day and bye.
ELIZABETH:
Bye.