Chieko asakawa biography examples

  • Asakawa first encountered computer science at the Nippon Institute, which offered a two-year course in information technology for blind students.
  • Dr Asakawa is behind early digital Braille innovations and created the world's first practical -to-speech browser.
  • Chieko Asakawa, FNAI, of IBM and NAI Member Institution Carnegie Mellon University, shares what inspires her to be an inventor and the importance of innovation.

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    Chieko Asakawa: Accessibility Activist, Patent Holder, and World Renowned Speaker

    Madeleine Janz

    June 11, 2019

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    One of four Women In Technology International Hall of Fame 2003 Inductees

    Chieko Asakawa was born in Osaka, Japan with full sight in both eyes, but after injuring her left eye on the edge of a swimming pool at age 11, she began to lose sight. By age 14, Asakawa was completely blind. Thankfully for the tech community, she didn't let this stop her. In 1982, she graduated from Otemon Gakuin University in Osaka with a bachelor's degree in English Literature. Asakawa then fused her literature and computer science interests to enroll in a two-year computer programming course for blind people where she used an Optacon for the translation of print to tactile sensation which benefited herself and her blind peers. Immediately after this work, she was hired at IBM, but only temporarily.

    This job quickly became permanent, in 1985, as her supervisors
  • chieko asakawa biography examples

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    Chieko Asakawa: Web Guru for the Blind

    Chieko Asakawa has just given the IEEE Spectrum website a once-over, and the verdict isn’t good. Her software program has declared that the site is neither operable nor understandable, and it has decorated Spectrum’s home page with a series of red frowny faces. “I’m afraid it’s pretty bad,” she says regretfully, smiling to soften the blow.

    Asakawa isn’t talking about what the site looks like—for someone who navigates the site visually, it’s a nicely organized wealth of information. But for Asakawa, who is blind, it’s a mess.

    She uses an audio Web browser that reads content aloud, and on Spectrum’s home page it bogs down in category headings and subheadings, taking minutes before it finally gets to an actual article headline. That’s not unusual, says Asakawa; many of the Web’s wonders are still inaccessible to the visually impaired. But Asakawa has done her best to change that through her work at the Tokyo branch of IBM

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    A member of the IBM Academy of Technology and an IBM Fellow, she is an Accessibility Designer, supporting web designers and developers in creating more accessible content. Blind from the age of 14, she leads by example, demonstrating that the impossible is never out of reach. She is responsible for the research and development of IBM software and applications that significantly improve web accessibility for the visually impaired and others with special needs. Her contributions to the field of accessibility research include making the internet and other web resources available to the visually impaired via PCs bygd automatically converting text and icons on the screen to röst. She joined IBM in 1985 after completing the computer science courses for the blind at Lighthouse Japan. She received a B.A. grad in English Literature from Otemon University in 1982, and a Ph.D. in Engineering from the University of Tokyo in 2004. Prior to assuming her current role in 2000, she held research an