Technology Founders Who Focused on Accessibility

Wheelchair-accessible vehicles. Braun, who had spinal muscular atrophy and used a wheelchair from childhood, built himself a motorised scooter in the 1960s in Indiana and then a lift to get his wheelchair into a van. Other disabled drivers asked for the same, and his company, now BraunAbility, grew into a leading maker of wheelchair lifts and converted vans. He designed from his own needs. He died in 2013.

The reading machine. Kurzweil founded Kurzweil Computer Products in 1974 to build optical character recognition that could read any typeface, and in 1976 combined it with a flatbed scanner and speech synthesiser in the Kurzweil Reading Machine for blind readers. The National Federation of the Blind helped test and refine it. The first machines were the size of a washing machine and very expensive, but they proved print could be turned into speech.

The screen reader. Henter, a motorcycle racer blinded in a car crash in 1978, retrained as a programmer and in 1987 co-founded Henter-Joyce with Bill Joyce in Florida. Their JAWS screen reader spoke what was on a computer screen and let blind users navigate with the keyboard, first in DOS and from 1995 in Windows, becoming the standard in workplaces. Its high price was long a barrier, which later free readers such as NVDA challenged.

Non-profit reading technology. Fruchterman, an engineer who co-founded the OCR firm Calera, set up Arkenstone in 1989 as a non-profit to sell affordable reading machines for blind people, then Benetech, whose Bookshare service, launched in 2002, gives print-disabled readers a large online library of accessible books under copyright exemptions. His model was building for social benefit where the market alone would not pay.

Mobility engineering. Kamen's research firm DEKA developed the iBOT, a wheelchair that uses gyroscopic balancing to climb stairs and raise its user to eye level, approved in the United States in 2003, and the Luke prosthetic arm for amputees under a military research programme. The iBOT was withdrawn in 2009 because few could afford it, then revived, a reminder that brilliant engineering still depends on price and insurers.

Eye tracking for communication. Elvesjö co-founded Tobii in Stockholm in 2001 after building an eye-tracking prototype as a student. Its devices let people who cannot speak or use their hands, such as those with motor neurone disease or cerebral palsy, select letters and symbols with their eyes and have a computer speak for them, through what became Tobii Dynavox. Calibration, cost and fatigue remain practical limits.

A camera that reads aloud. Aviram co-founded OrCam in Jerusalem in 2010 with Amnon Shashua, his Mobileye partner, applying their computer vision work to the MyEye, a small camera clipped to glasses that reads printed text, recognises faces and identifies products and banknotes for blind and partially sighted users, working offline. Its price put it out of reach for many without funding schemes.