Cover Letter for John J. Boyer

For contact, send e-mail to john.boyer@abilitiessoft.cem . There is no phone number. A physical address will be provided to those who need it.

I have been a programmer for 42 years and have run Computers to Help People, Inc. (CHPI) for 25 of these. The company is now spinning off software development, and I am becoming the President. The most relevant of these yearss are the 5-1/2 years, from January 1994 to June 1999, during which I did subcontract work for Braille Planet Inc. (BP) on behalf of CHPI and the three years, up to the present, in which I have done contract work for ViewPlus Technologies, Inc. For them I have developed a Linux driver for their Tifer line of braille ombossers and a braille translator and back-translator. Currently, I am working on extending the translator to handle MathML. The work with Braille Planet is highly relevant and is discussed below.

p>In late 1993 Braille Planet approached me about helping with the development of a mathematics feature for the

  1. Subroutines which could handle the sometimes arcane rules of the Nemeth Code of Braille Mathematics;
  2. Tables of rules for both forward- and back-translation;
  3. A lengthy pick list of mathematical symbols to assist in math data entry. This list had a type-ahead feature and was arranged alphbetically.
  4. A "cache" of the last 20 symbols picked, to further speed up data entry and reduce effort;
  5. Special styles within the Nemeth stylesheet for graphs, arithmetic, spatially laid out math, etc.;
  6. A Quick-reference style guide;
  7. A quick-reference keystroke guide;
  8. Instructions for students who wished to write their math and science exam papers in braille and have megaDots back-translate them.

In doing this work I was a member of two teams. One was the team of MegaDots developers. Although BP was also located in Madison Wisconsin, most of the communication and trading of code was done by e-mail. An occasional visit was necessary to work out particularly nasty bugs, but I am confident that this could be done today via e-mail and the vastly improved Web. The other team consisted of my own people at CHPI, who took care of such tasks as bookkeeping and helping with communication when I needed an interpreter. (I am both deaf and blind.)

Both the MegaDots team and the users, the people who produced books containing Braille mathematics, were very pleased with my work. By speeding up the process of producing such books, it also gave me the impetus to establish the Technical Braille Center at CHPI. The Center has produced over fifty Braille books in the sciences and mathematics in the last four years.

Although my experience has been mostly in Braille translation, I see no reason why my general programming background should not enable me to do equally well in other projects related to disalility. And I now have a much better support team here, to say nothing of better hardware and software.

I look forward to hearing from you.

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Abilitiessoft, Inc. All rights reserved.

Last updated 02/21/2006.