An introduction to Innosearch, a company that aims to streamline your shopping experience;
A JAWS power tip, suppressing undesired chatter on the web;
Fun stories and great memories in part two of our interview with Ted Henter.
All this and some more on FSCast episode 257 for April 2025.
OLEG SHEVKUN
Welcome to FSCast for April 2025, and here in our virtual studio we are Elizabeth Whitiker. Hi, Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH WHITAKER:
Hi, Oleg.
OLEG:
Yeah, and I'm Oleg Shevkun. And Elizabeth, how was your month, so April, here at Vispero?
ELIZABETH:
April was such a great month. It was so busy, and we love busy months. We had several events. We had a webinar on the new Outlook, and this is something that we did a webinar back in February, it was our introductory webinar. But we followed up in April and we're going to be doing more training on the new Outlook, so we're not finished with that by any means, but we followed up with several tasks that people do every day in Outlook. And how do you perform these in the new Outlook? That webinar is, of course, archived on our webinars on demand page, so you can go to freedom scientific.com/webinars to stream or download it.
OLEG:
And that s free, by the way, right? You don't have to pay, you don't have to subscribe to anything. You just go and download and listen.
ELIZABETH:
Absolutely, 100% free. So in addition to that, we had our very first Insert J Club event. Now, if you don't know what Insert J Club is, it's also free to join, but is a club that we've created for users to build community. We want to engage with you, we want to get to know who our users are and to offer you exclusive content. So we're offering things like webinar files prior to the webinar, you don't have to wait until the webinar to receive those.
OLEG:
You mean webinar files like presentations? Or what would that be?
ELIZABETH:
These are resource files that we offer. So when we have a webinar, we offer the tasks that we discussed in the webinar in the form of a resource document. It's usually a Word document that just goes through all of the different tasks and gives you a written version of that. So that's one example of the type of content that we're offering. We're going to be offering training. We've also had our very first training Q&A where Insert J Club members came and asked training questions, so we're going to do more of those as well.
And we did have our welcome webinar, as I mentioned, where we all came together, introduced ourselves, and we talked about what we're going to offer, what people can expect from Insert J Club, and how our software has impacted lives. So people had the opportunity to tell their stories and it was very interesting, it was very moving, and we look forward to doing that again. So if you're not a member, we encourage you to go on over to freedomscientific.com/insertjclub and read all the information and join. We are going to hold events every month. So at the end of every month, users will get an email that outlines the events for the next month, and then throughout the month, information about what's going on during the month. So we're going to hold regular events. And it's fun, it's engaging, and it's just very interactive, so we encourage all of you to join.
So that was our April. What about yours, Oleg?
OLEG:
Well, mine was quite busy. And one highlight of this April have been the responses that we get, the emails that we get from you. There are some really good old friends that wrote in. That's always nice. And there are new people that we've never heard from, giving us product ideas and suggestions. By the way, I'd like to remind you that we do have a suggestions address, which is softwaresuggestions@vispero.com. And these emails do get to our product management, so that's a good address to know.
Now, along with that, we've been working on updates for our products, the May updates, which will come out sometime hopefully in the first half of May. But also, we've got our April updates to fix some issues that we've had with Google Chrome. So if your product, like JAWS or ZoomText or Fusion, notifies you of an update, that's the April update. There are more features to come in May. But for now, that update, which you can also download from our website, resolves some very specific issues. So please feel free to just go ahead and download it for better performance.
ELIZABETH:
Now, Oleg, don't we have a power tip for this month? I know we haven't talked about one here in quite a while, but I thought we had one that was emailed to us.
OLEG:
Well, in fact, yes, we do have a JAWS power tip and that was emailed to us by Negoslav Sabev in Bulgaria. And here goes.
Have you ever been frustrated by JAWS getting too chatty on websites? For example, JAWS might be saying things like On click . Or, in a web email interface, it will announce unwanted tables, even though you're sure that layout tables are set to off. To tame those annoying announcements, we use web verbosity or virtual cursor verbosity settings.
So, actually, this is pretty straightforward, yet very powerful.
I am now in Microsoft Edge; but I could be using any browser, like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. And I am pressing INSERT+V for Quick Settings.
JAWS VOICE:
Quick Settings, MSEdge Dialog. Search box, Edit. CTRL+E.
OLEG:
And instead of searching, let me just press TAB and go down through the treeview
JAWS:
Virtual Cursor verbosity level: medium. 1 of 13.
OLEG:
This is the Virtual Cursor verbosity setting. And I can toggle between three levels. So currently, and by default, it s set to medium. But I can use the SPACE key to toggle this to high or low.
Also, just as with other Quick Settings, I can open the Context Menu, which contains the following selections:
Restore setting when JAWS Exits. This will make the setting apply only for the current JAWS session.
Restore setting when focus changes. This makes the setting apply only until you ALT+TAB away from the browser window, or until another focus change event.
Save the setting: this will make the new verbosity level permanent.
So, that s how you quickly adjust verbosity settings. And think of them as presets. You have low, medium and high Web verbosity,
But then, a question remains: how do you actually adjust each of these presets?
To do so, from within a browser like Microsoft Edge, we open Settings Center by pressing INSERT+6.
We probably do not need to modify default settings at this time, since we want our changes to affect the current browser only. So, in the Search field, we type verbosity . At this point, we get Web verbosity level as one of our search results. We can now press TAB to go there. JAWS says: Web verbosity level medium, reading web/HTML/PDFs . And yes, it applies to web, HTML, as well as PDF, but I'm configuring this right now just for Microsoft Edge. So it's not going to affect other browsers installed in my system and it's definitely not going to affect Adobe Reader.
If I arrow down, JAWS says: Configure web verbosity levels . And that s exactly what we want to do. So, I press F6 to get into the right pane, and now I see buttons for each of the verbosity levels. I can configure each of them separately and then choose the desired configuration. Let me press tab to get to medium, and then press SPACE to activate that button.
We now get a treeview with available Web verbosity settings. We can navigate through the treeview in the usual way, with the arrow keys. For each setting, I can toggle it on and off. And also, I can press TAB for each setting to get the relevant help message explaining what that setting is.
One of the elements in this treeview is the announcement of tables. This is exactly what our friend Negoslav likes to torn off for some specific Web site, such as Gmail.
Also, please note that we are not suppressing the announcement of the element text. Our settings affect only the notification of the element type, as well as, in some cases, their beginning and their end.
Web verbosity settings are a great field for experimentation. For example, you can say, "Okay, I'm going to make the low level my experimental field. I'm going to turn things off and on to see what happens. Or I'm going to research to find out what each of those elements does to be more informed."
BTW, you can choose the desired Web verbosity level right here, in Settings Center. But we have already seen that it s a lot easier to do so via Quick Settings. And there, you can also set the scope for each Web verbosity level.
So, think of Quick Settings as a quick way to switch between presets. And think of Settings Center as a more detailed way to configure these presets.
So web verbosity settings, or virtual cursor verbosity settings, to me is one of the hidden gems of JAWS. It takes time to master, but if you know what it is and how to use it, it will allow you to tame some web pages where JAWS seems to talk too much.
Thank you Negoslav for this power tip.
And if you have your JAWS power tip to share and it gets published on FSCast, then as a way of saying thank you, we'll extend your JAWS license for one year.
ELIZABETH:
Now I want to welcome Bryan Vuong, one of the founders of Innosearch, a company who is changing the way we shop online. Bryan, welcome to FSCast.
BRYAN VUONG:
Thank you, Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH:
Now, online shopping is something that many of us do on a regular basis, whether we're searching for household products, electronics, services, lots of different types of products. So I just wanted to start out by asking you to tell us a little bit about Innosearch. What is it? And how did it come about?
BRYAN:
Innosearch is an accessible digital platform designed specifically for the blind and low vision users. Our vision is basically to build an all-in-one digital platform for blind, low vision users, which could include shopping, flight booking, grocery and food delivery, and even others. So we started out with the e-commerce or shopping vertical and we have built Innosearch from day one as an accessible e-commerce platform where basically we have almost all the products of the internet in a very easy to use, very accessible format for the blind, low vision users. And people can search, browse, and purchase products directly on Innosearch. We recently added flight booking and we are in the progress of adding food and grocery delivery.
ELIZABETH:
Well, first of all, let's talk about the web address, which isInnosearch.ai. So what can people expect there?
BRYAN:
Yeah, so when people go to Innosearch.ai, people will see our landing page basically describing the mission of Innosearch and what we do. And then on the navigation bar on the top of the page, then people will find different categories to use our services. For example, shopping, flight booking, and in the future, like I said, food and grocery delivery.
ELIZABETH:
Let's say I go there and I want to search for a particular product. Do I search by product? Am I going to be purchasing products from other retail sites? Or how will this work?
BRYAN:
It is a very simple experience. People just search for any product that they would like to buy. For example, they can search for a pair of headphones. And what will happen is that Innosearch will go through different retailers' websites and to pull the information all together and to show in one single place on Innosearch. So people can see a lot of different products coming from a lot of different retailers. Currently, we have more than one million products from a hundred thousand retailers across the world. So people can just look at the search result to figure out what product should be the best.
And they can also interact with our AI. So we have a very nice and interesting feature, which is the AI on Innosearch where people can ask any questions about the product. For example, they can ask for the reviews and the rating, can ask for further details, for example, if the headphone is going to work in certain countries or different conditions, or they can also ask about expert review of the product. And the AI will be able to provide all those information for the user. And once the user is happy with the that they are looking at, that they can add that to cart and to proceed to check out all on Innosearch.
So our checkout process is built on top of Stripe, which is a worldwide leader in payment processing. And we provide the top-notch security and privacy so that users can check out securely on Innosearch. And in the background, then we have the AI basically to fulfill the order from the retailer and ship that directly to the user's address.
ELIZABETH:
Okay, and what about if someone has a question about a visual aspect of the item, maybe color or size or something like that? Does the AI answer those types of questions as well?
BRYAN:
Oh, yes. So that is a very nice feature that we built in our AI. So basically, the user can ask about the appearance of the product. For example, they can ask the AI to describe the first image of the product, and the AI will be able to tell all the details of the product in the picture.
ELIZABETH:
Okay. Let's go back to the search aspect of it, so someone types in headphones, for example, they get a lot of different headphones from different retailers, can you just search by retailer? Could you search for a specific retailer instead of for a product? Or could you even filter it down to I want to search for headphones on this retailer's site?
BRYAN:
Yes, you can. So this can be done in two ways. One is in the search query, the user can specify very specifically, for example, headphones from Target. So basically, the search result will be narrowed down to the products from Target.
The second way that the users can do is basically can filter. So after searching for the headphones with the query headphones for example, then there's a filter button right below the search box that the user can enter any text, and the search result will be filtered based on that input. So for example, the user can enter Target or Home Depot, then all the products from those retailers will show on the screen, and others will disappear.
ELIZABETH:
Oh, great. So that makes it much easier to really hone in on what you're looking for and really drill down into those results.
BRYAN:
Yes, exactly.
ELIZABETH:
So let's talk about the airline tickets. How do you search for airline tickets and how does that work? Because I know that's something that a lot of JAWS users, a lot of screen reader users struggle with, because when you're searching, different pages are, of course, set up differently and sometimes you just really want to search for an airline ticket and get all of those results all at once instead of having to go from this site to this site to this site. So tell us a little bit about that. How does it work?
BRYAN:
So we have designed the flight search and fight booking in a very simple, accessible way. So for an user, when they go to flight search, they just need to enter the departure, arrival airport, and the desired dates and then they search. And then all the flights meeting the requirements will appear. All the flights from all the airlines that are available will be shown on the search result of Innosearch. And then the user can choose the departure and the return flights based on the need and then they can proceed to check out. So all in one place.
And we also have designed in a way that it's very simple. We have removed all the ads, all the clutter, just the key information about the flights, and the user can navigate very easily using screen readers like JAWS and also others and to really focus on the key information of the flight to ensure that the booking is as smooth as possible.
ELIZABETH:
Okay. So it makes navigation very smooth and makes it easy to compare those prices and those flight times and availability.
BRYAN:
That's correct.
ELIZABETH:
Now, let's go back to the grocery orders that people are going to be able to place on Innosearch. Can you tell us a little more about how that's going to work?
BRYAN:
So it is very similar to shopping, but first the user needs to enter their location into Innosearch so that we know that is the location that the food or grocery should be delivered to. And then the user can search for certain store or certain items, either food or grocery, and then we'll list all the available stores providing those items. After that, the user can also select certain items, select the quantity, and then proceed to check out.
And then in the background, we have the AI to fulfill the orders for the user. And depending on the available service in that area, either that is DoorDash, either that is Uber Eats or Instacart, then we pick the best delivery service to deliver the food or grocery items to users. And the user will also have the checking information like where the order is and can also have the option to chat with the driver to coordinate the delivery.
ELIZABETH:
Okay. Would the person have to have, for example, if it was Instacart, would they need the Instacart app on their mobile device? Or how would that work? How would they chat then with the driver? Would it be on the computer or another way?
BRYAN:
It would be via Innosearch. So we are going to build that functionality inside Innosearch.
ELIZABETH:
All right, great. And I'm also assuming that you can search for a specific store, for example, that if you wanted to shop at Target or maybe Meijer or something like that, you could search for a specific store and then do all of your grocery shopping at that store and then have your groceries delivered by service.
BRYAN:
That's correct.
ELIZABETH:
Great. I did want to mention too something coming up pertaining to Innosearch. On Thursday, May 29th at noon Eastern, we are here, on our training team at Vispero, going to be partnering with you all to host a webinar. We're going to be talking about how to use Innosearch with JAWS. So we'll be showing you how to access Innosearch.ai, how to navigate, how to search, and walking you through the process of purchasing a product.
So again, that is May 29th, that's a Thursday at noon Eastern. You can learn more by going to freedomscientific.com/training. That's our training page. From there, go to the heading upcoming events or upcoming webinars and you can follow the link and register for the webinar. Now, if you have any questions or if you need help with registration, please do not hesitate to send us an email to training@vispero.com.
All right, Bryan, anything else that you'd like to add?
BRYAN:
Yeah, one thing I would like to mention is, how we rely a lot on the power of artificial intelligence to empower our platform. So like I said earlier, we have the chatbot, the AI component on Innosearch so that users can also ask any questions or can ask it to describe images. But in the background, we also use AI a lot in fetching the information from different retailers and to simplify the information to make it in a very simple and accessible format so that it can be very screen reader friendly.
We also use AI a lot in order fulfillment. Basically, we have the AI agent that we build in the background so that whenever an order comes in, then the AI agent can navigate to the internet and to place an order on behalf of the users.
And in addition to the technologies, we also have a very strong customer service focus. So we have a dedicated team of customer service representatives who are always up 24/7 to support the users. So if you have any questions, have any problems with the order or just want to learn more about our services, then feel free to send us an email at info@Innosearch.ai.
ELIZABETH:
Yeah, and I'm glad you mentioned more about the AI aspect of it, because I think another way that AI is going to be extremely powerful is with the grocery shopping where you can ask it questions, and get a lot of information about the products that you're purchasing no matter what they are really. But just talking about the things that are coming up, I think there's a lot that AI can do and I look forward to seeing what you all add in the future.
BRYAN:
Yeah, we are excited with that new direction as well.
ELIZABETH:
All right. Well, thank you once again for joining us and we look forward to that partner webinar. Once again, that's May 29th at noon Eastern, that is on a Thursday. Join us and thank you again for joining us for FSCast.
BRYAN:
Thank you, Elizabeth, for having me here to talk about Innosearch.
OLEG:
Quite a few of you wrote in to say that you enjoyed the first part of the interview we had with Ted Henter. And today, we're going to hear more of that interview. A lot of this was about people. And there were some stories that I heard before and I wanted a confirmation or more details from Ted.
Now, one of those stories was about an associate, a programmer actually, who was employed by Henter-Joyce right after arriving from Cuba. I was wondering whether that story was true and whether Ted would give us more details, and here's what he said.
TED HENTER:
That's true. We got a call from Lighthouse for the Blind in Miami. I forgot the lady's name, but that would be a good thing to have. Got a call from her and she said she had this guy from Cuba and he had a couple of degrees in math and he said he was a computer programmer and he was looking for a job. And I said, "Well, put him on the bus to St. Petersburg. We'll pick him up at the bus station and we'll interview him." So that's what we did, that was Andres Gonzalez.
Now, what happened with him is he was born blind or lost his sight early on. Went through schools for the blind, became a very proficient Braille reader. What I read was he got some education in Paris, but also I was told by him that he came from Spain. Or maybe it was the Lighthouse that told me that he came from Spain. And that's how he got out of Cuba so he could go to study in Spain. And then he got on a plane and ended up in Miami. Now, his wife was still in Cuba.
So anyway, he came up on the bus, we picked him up at the bus station. And then we spent several hours with him that day, and we all liked him. He was obviously very smart and he wanted a job, and he was blind. This was perfect, this is the kind of people we like to hire. So we told him, "Go home and get your stuff and come back when you can."
That's when we picked him up at the bus station again, helped him find an apartment. Joe Semparosa, who was our driver, he did that for a lot of our employees when they came into town, they didn't know where to find an apartment. There was a couple of apartments close by that a lot of the blind employees liked, so we took them over there, Joe took him over there and got an apartment and all was set.
He turned out to be really good. We got him a Braille display to go with JAWS. And he was very instrumental in the support for Braille with JAWS, he did a lot of that programming.
Life goes on, everything was great. He was working to get his wife out of Cuba and into the US. He was established, he had a job and he could be the sponsor for his wife. In the meantime, we had this mobile home on a nice little lake up in north Florida, north of Ocala. And we would take a lot of the employees up there and go water-skiing. If they don't want to water ski, that's okay, we'll go tubing or just swimming around in the lake. There was an island about 200 yards offshore that we could swim to. Some people swung on the rope swing. One guy sprained his ankle dropping off the rope swing at the wrong time. It's hard to judge on a rope swing, if you can't see it, exactly when to drop off. And we just had a great time up there. We had several musicians in our group. So we spent a lot of time standing around the bonfire singing songs, and somebody had a guitar. It was great.
So now back to Andres, he wanted to learn how to water-ski. Well, my wife was driving the boat. I was in the boat giving him some verbal instructions, Keep the tip of the skis up out of the water, keep the skis together, don't do the splits, don't lean too forward or back. Keep your arms out straight in case you do start to fall forward, you could pull your arms in and catch yourself.
So he gets up, and the boat's going about 20 miles an hour, and he fell face-first into the water, a face plant and his glass eyes popped out of his head. I'm laughing about it now, it wasn't very funny then. And as far as I know, they're still at the bottom of that lake. We still own that property. And this happened about, would've been like almost 30 years ago, 28 years ago.
So his eyes were at the bottom of the lake. He did get back up on skis and tried it again. But now he was really upset because his wife was coming to Miami in a matter of, let's say a week, and he didn't have his eyes. He didn't think he was going to be that handsome fellow that she last saw in Cuba. Well, somehow he got some temporary glass eyes and everything worked out good. Then he got some other eyes made and everything worked out good for him. So he was a very valuable member of our development team, the JAWS team. Now he's at Apple. He's working on the access technology stuff in Apple.
OLEG:
Today, you've been talking a lot more of people than software features or business plans. I understand that the business culture of 1995 was radically different from what we see today in most businesses in 2025, just because of the size and the way things worked. How did you make or did you have to make people, shall I say, feel good or feel welcome in the company? How did you create the company culture that valued those who work for you? Did you have to do anything special, or was that part of the DNA at the time?
TED:
I think you could say it's part of the DNA. That's just my personality. I don't try to grab all the publicity or all the kudos. I'm more than happy to share it with people that deserve it. So I'm sure most of the people that came to work for us felt valued. And not only did they feel valued by me and others at the company, they came to us in many cases because we were doing something that they really appreciated. We were making software to get jobs for blind people. And a lot of people saw that as a very beneficial thing to do and they wanted to be part of it. Like Jerry Bowmann, he saw what we were trying to do and he saw that it was going to be very helpful for other blind people, not only in Florida or the United States, but around the world, and that's what attracted him. And then in the case of Glenn being blind and a computer guy, he really wanted to improve the product that he was going to use. So that was his motivation. And Eric had a blind father that he grew up with. And Eric saw how cool this technology was and how beneficial it would be to all kinds of people, and that's what attracted him to our company.
OLEG:
If you think of a spectrum in software development, where on one end of the spectrum you would have long-term planning, roadmaps and so on, and on the other hand you would have quick customer response and a bit of impulsiveness and flexibility. Where will you put yourself and your business on that spectrum? And are these balanceable?
TED:
I'm not an educated software developer. I have a degree in mechanical engineering, but I never learned the proper ways, the methods of designing software. When I was writing software, I'd just get the impulse to do something and then try to do it.
And in our situation, I had a fairly good idea what I wanted it to look like, but in this case feel like. Then once we got a product, whether it was the DOS product or the Windows product, we didn't have to go looking for ideas, they would just come in the phone line. People would call us up, "Oh, it doesn't do this, and it crashed when I did that." And we always had a big list of bugs to fix and new features to develop.
OLEG:
How do you prioritize that though? Just suppose, for a moment, you've got a timeline of development for the next year and you've got a phone call from a customer who says, "Hey, I'm going to be losing my job if, in three months, JAWS cannot do this and this." And you look at it and you say, "Technically, it's possible, but am I going to relocate or redistribute developer resources just to help that customer?"
TED:
That was a hard decision. Because if one guy had that problem, there might be another 100 that are going to have the same problem next month. And a lot of people would call and say, "Hey, I'll be losing my job if I can't get JAWS for Windows working." So that was a lot of motivation for us, meaning Glen and me and Carl Wise and other developers.
One thing we had to take into consideration is how difficult is what they're asking for? How difficult is it and how much time will it take? Could we fix these other five bugs in the same time we could develop that new feature? So it was just a balancing act the whole time.
And it wasn't until like, oh, around 1998 that I really started feeling pretty comfortable. We had enough people to handle the problems. We had some pretty smart people that really knew how to prioritize and make those decisions. And we had a lot of people that were in touch with the customers.
So as time went on, we became more mature as developers. It's just a natural process. But in the beginning, it was all impulse. And if I thought we could do it, we'd try to do it. And if Glen said it was going to be too hard or it's going to take three months, we wouldn't do it. We'd have to put it off and work on four other projects in the meantime.
OLEG:
I'm going to dare to ask you this question. Just for a full disclosure, I've known you, although not too closely, of course, for many, many years, but you impress me and you've always impressed me as a person of impulse and a person of vision. And this business strategy stuff requires lots of documentation, lots of record keeping, being pedantic of sort. And you've never impressed me as a pedantic record keeper. Was I wrong all my life, or is there any degree of truth about this? And if there's a degree of truth, then how do you compensate? What do you do about it?
TED:
You're absolutely right, Oleg. I'm very fortunate that I'm reasonably intelligent. But like you said, I don't do a lot of planning, at least in the early days because the problem is we're just coming in the door, so to speak, on the phone. So then we would get focused on fixing this bug or that bug or adding this feature. And I never actually sat down and drew out an outline or anything like that. But it was conferring with smart people like the programmers I've already mentioned.
And before I was blind, I was a motorcycle racer. And in motorcycle racing, you got to make a lot of quick decisions fast. Not only when you're racing on the bike, but when you're in the pits, adjusting the tuning of the motor, the carburation, the timing, the spark plugs, the air pressure in the tires. You got to make a lot of decisions based on how it feels out there on the racetrack.
So that's kind of the way I developed things. I did okay as a motorcycle racer. I had one mistake where I was blinded in a car accident, but I survived. And a counselor here at the Division of Blind Services in Florida told me, "Hey, you already got an engineering degree. You should try computers." It wasn't a well-thought-out decision to do things the way I did them. It just kind of happened.
Good things happened. Chuck walked in, he had experience. We hired Greg, and we hired Chuck, and then we hired Glen and Eric and Jerry and Carl Wise and all kinds of people. They just wanted to work for that company. And I was always willing to give them the benefit of the doubt and always give them the credit for the right decisions, for the success of the product, things like that. I couldn't have done it without Glen and Eric and Jerry and a whole bunch of other people.
Carl Wise was a math teacher at my daughter's seventh grade, I think it was. In the summertime, he walked across the street where our office was and he asked for a job. And I said, "Sure, we'll give you a job for the summer." Summer ended, he didn't want to go back to teach math, he wanted to keep working. I said, "Okay, we'll see how that works." And I did what I could to encourage him and so did Glen. And he turned out to be a very valuable software guy and he's still working for the company, for Vispero.
OLEG:
He's actually the person who coordinates all the software development with JAWS and ZoomText and the Fusion suite. So he is a key person, a key player.
Ted Henter:
Key person. Yeah. And did I think things through and make big plans? No. I did it mostly impulsively and a spur of the moment. But we had a lot of input from other people, is what I'm trying to say. A lot of people would call in for tech support, and if I was doing tech support, I'd say, "Oh, that's a problem in the software." So that would go on the list. And I'd tell that person, "Well, let's see what we can do. Maybe in a month, we'll have it," stuff like that.
You just got to make decisions on the fly, and all with the idea that that's not the only problem you're going to have, you're going to have 20 other problems. So you've got to somehow balance them. And not only to fix that person's problem, but to create a feature that'll make the product more desirable. So you try to fit all that together.
And that's just because I'm blind and Glen is blind, we were two of the key decision makers for the product development. And because we're blind, well, that's a big advantage. When people asked for a feature, we could see what the benefit was. And when they pointed out a bug, we could also see that. Without Glen and me being blind and having some authority in the company, it would be a problem. If we were just blind employees with no real authority, well, that doesn't always work out. And if we were just decision makers with no skills, that wouldn't work out either.
We hired blind people every chance we got. I think it's safe to say that 12 or 13 tech support people we had, they were all blind or low vision. Half our sales force was blind. A large percentage of our developers were blind. We hired blind people whenever we could.
OLEG:
Actually, it was kind of fun. I remember I was living in Russia at that time, like '97, '98. Calling your tech support for me was an international call, but I'm going to reveal a secret after those years. I would call sometimes not because I had a problem, I knew how to solve the problem, but these guys were just fun to talk to, some guys with a thick southern accent. I remember there was a guy named Donnie Dunn, so when you got Donnie Dunn, I'm hoping I'm not butchering the name here.
TED:
Let me tell you about Donnie Dunn. He was injured in Vietnam, in the war. So his legs were cut off right above the knee and he was blinded and he must've stepped on a landmine. It blinded him and it cut off his legs. So he was in a wheelchair and doing tech support and managing his farm out in Oklahoma. He lived in Oklahoma. And he would come and visit us maybe once a year on the airplane with an electric wheelchair. And he goes zipping around our office, one hand holding a cane out in front of him, the other hand operating the electric wheelchair. He was an amazing guy. He's deceased now, bless his heart. Hope he's doing good. He was a great guy though.
And see, that's the kind of people that we like to have. He loved helping the customers. He was very smart, knew the product well. You got to have people like that to keep your customers happy.
OLEG:
Ted, I've got to throw in a memory of my own here. I was working for Freedom Scientific in early 2000s, doing JAWS testing. And we had a developer, a scriptwriter named Dennis Brown, and he was responsible for Outlook scripts. And he assigned a script to a command that was really hard to press, the key combination really required some effort. And I wrote him back and I said, "How do you press this?" And he writes back and he says, "I don't, because I don't have any hands."
TED:
Yeah, well, like I said before, we focused on hiring blind people. But if some guy like that came and he wanted a job, we'd hire just about anybody.
OLEG:
You were really US-centric. How did y'all go international?
TED:
Well, we were very US-centric, English speech because that was me. I didn't use Braille, I didn't speak other languages. And we were really busy just satisfying our American customers with speech. Well, Tobias Winnes and his partner came to us at one of those Dueling Windows things around '96.
OLEG:
So they traveled to the states from Germany.
TED:
Yeah. They came to one of the shows, probably CSUN, and came to talk to us. And they convinced Eric and me and Glen that we needed to have Braille support and different language support and we could sell a lot of product in Europe. So he became our European distributor and he rounded up the right people over there that could do the testing and Braille, the localizing. We had to rewrite part of our software so you could localize it easily, meaning you could change the words into a different language.
Yeah, well, that just grew. It grew organically. We didn't plan ahead initially, we just did it the quick and dirty way. And then we realized, well, we got to redo that.
OLEG:
And you had to start supporting Braille too. And the Braille displays, which they were many, and you'd have to build in support for each Braille display because there was no unified driver.
TED:
That was another step. Initially, we would write a special driver for each Braille display. And then I guess it was Glenn came up with the idea of a unified driver. Then it became the responsibility of the Braille display developer to match their software to our software because there was so many of them. And they knew their products better than we do. Those are just things you learn along the way.
OLEG:
And today, we're implementing the Braille HID, which is a unified standard. So again, history in the making.
Was Latin America a lot easier than Europe?
TED:
Well, to start with, Eric talked with ONCE in Spain, and they wanted to buy hundreds if not thousands of JAWS, if we could make it talk in Spanish. That was a bunch of sales just sitting there, so I think that's the one we worked on first was Castilian Spanish. And then back to Latin America, I think it was Columbia, the country itself bought a whole bunch for the blind people there. And if you were blind in Columbia, you got JAWS.
But like in Panama, there was not an agency that would do that. The blind organization didn't have a lot of money. They had Helen Keller School for the Blind, and Patronato Luz del Ciego, which was a training center for adult blind. And they had JAWS. I walked in there one day, 1999, just for the heck of it, I wanted to see what they were using, and they had a dozen computers running JAWS sitting right there.
And I started talking to them and they recognized my name. "Oh, Henter, that sounds familiar." So we became very friendly with that group. And we also supported the Helen Keller School for the Blind. The JAWS and presents for Christmas and teddy bears at Easter time, or bunny rabbits, I guess it was. We had Christmas parties. One time, we bought hearing aids for a deaf blind girl. It was the first time she ever heard her mom talk. And I was there and my family was there when she said, "Mama," everybody started crying.
It just all worked out. We were very fortunate that we were there when the time came and that we had talented people that could do what needed to be done.
OLEG:
And to say quite plainly something that you've alluded to already, I think you went to where the money was to make sales, but on the other hand, you were really liberal, in a good sense of the word, to contribute JAWS licenses wherein there was no money, but there was need. So the two combined together.
TED:
Yeah, we did give away some. One time we gave 50 copies of JAWS to training centers all over Europe. That was something that Tobias worked out. And I actually went to Budapest and met a lot of the people there, we had a conference there. That was about 2001, 2002.
OLEG:
When you look at your life in general, where would Henter-Joyce and JAWS for DOS and JAWS for Windows be? It's hard, of course, to range the achievements and the experience of your life. But you probably do it, all of us do it sometimes. Is that a highlight? Is that the main achievement? Is that part of something bigger?
TED:
I would say developing JAWS is at the top of my list as far as accomplishments. I also enjoyed my motorcycle racing career, I had a few accomplishments there. I was the world champion blind water skier, I had an accomplishment there. I have a brown belt in karate, martial arts. I've raced through the Panama Canal 17 times. I've done a lot of other things, but for sure, developing a product like JAWS and helping thousands of people around the world, that's the top of my list. The other accomplishments, I'm proud of, but they're not nearly as important as JAWS.
OLEG:
Well, thank you, Ted, and happy 30th anniversary.
TED:
Thank you very much, Oleg. I'm very happy to be here with you and to be able to talk about this stuff. Thank you very much for the opportunity to tell some of these stories.
ELIZABETH:
And that was Ted Henter. It's always great to hear from him.
OLEG:
Yeah, and by the way, hopefully we'll hear from some other JAWS pioneers in our upcoming episodes.
ELIZABETH:
I just wanted to mention too, coming up in May, we do have another webinar from the training department that's going to be Thursday, May 15th at noon Eastern. And we're going to be giving you 10 power tips for navigating Windows 11 with JAWS. So we're going to talk about things like how to manage notifications, how to navigate File Explorer, and a whole lot more.
So head on over to Freedomscientific.com/training. You can go to the heading that says upcoming webinars. You can also visit our schedule page from the training page, and you can register in either of those places.
OLEG:
And you can always write to training@vispero.com with your suggestions or ideas. And you can write to FSCast at Vispero.com also with your suggestions, questions, and ideas for FSCast. And I think for now, we're really running out of time, Elizabeth.
ELIZABETH:
Yes, Oleg, we are. But we'll be back next month, of course. And there is a lot for you to engage in this month. We want to hear from you. And thank you for joining us for this episode.
OLEG:
And from all of us here at Vispero, all the best and have a good month.