Jamie Teh and Mick Curran are software program builders and musicians from Brisbane, Australia who met after they have been children at a music camp for the blind, the place they bonded over a shared love of pc programming and music. They’re now each married with households of their very own and have remained shut buddies. Practically twenty years in the past, they began one among their most necessary tasks that will assist change the world for the higher whereas constructing a group of devoted folks.
In 2006, Mick took a break from faculty to work on an concept he had for display reader software program. He knew the excessive worth was conserving many blind folks from discovering jobs or utilizing a pc, and he wished to vary that with software program that will all the time be reasonably priced for everybody. He requested Jamie, who’d just lately graduated with a level in IT and was working full-time, to assist him develop it. Jamie was excited to collaborate, regardless of his preliminary uncertainty about how profitable they might be with software program so many corporations had been engaged on for years.
For the following 12 months, Mick and Jamie labored collectively to create an open-source display reader often called NVDA, or NonVisual Desktop Entry, for computer systems working on Home windows. A 12 months later, Mick attended the CSUN Assistive Know-how Convention hosted by the Heart on Disabilities at California State College, Northridge. When Accessibility groups from main tech corporations, together with Microsoft, expressed curiosity in integrating NVDA with their platforms and browsers, Mick and Jamie knew they’d a successful product. That 12 months, they based NV Entry as a nonprofit group to assist the event of NVDA by means of funding and grants, and continued to attend CSUN for a few years.
NVDA quickly turned out there on GitHub as an open-source display reader for Microsoft Home windows, permitting a world group of contributors to develop the software program with the most recent updates and add-ons.