Chieko Asakawa

Chieko Asakawa is a Japanese computer scientist and IBM researcher known for pioneering digital accessibility technologies, including systems that help blind people use the web and access information.

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IBM Home Page Reader: A speech-based web browser developed by IBM to make websites accessible to blind users. Asakawa helped create this browser, which brought spoken access to the web to personal computers.
IBM Research: The research organization of IBM, whose laboratories develop computer science and engineering technologies. Asakawa conducted much of her influential accessibility research within this organization.
Screen reader: Assistive software that converts on-screen text and controls into speech or refreshable braille. Screen readers are the key software layer through which blind users access web content.
Web Content Accessibility Guidelines: International recommendations for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. The guidelines express shared accessibility goals that tools like Asakawa's make practically attainable.
VoiceOver: Apple's screen-reading technology that speaks interface content and supports interaction through keyboard, gestures, or braille displays. It represents a later mainstream approach to the screen-access problem Asakawa's work helped advance.
Toshiyuki Takahashi: A Japanese computer scientist associated with research on accessibility and human-computer interaction. His work and collaboration belong to the research community surrounding Asakawa's accessibility projects.
Text-to-speech: Technology that converts written text into synthesized spoken language. Speech output makes web pages and other digital information accessible without visual reading.
Accessible Rich Internet Applications: A technical specification for adding accessibility semantics to dynamic web interfaces. Dynamic web applications create challenges that extend the accessibility problems her work addressed.
Web accessibility: The practice of designing websites and web applications so people with disabilities can perceive, understand, navigate, and use them. Her research helped establish practical ways to make web content usable without sight.
Ben Shneiderman: An American computer scientist known for research in human-computer interaction and information visualization. His HCI scholarship offers a useful parallel to Asakawa's focus on usable interactive systems.