Chieko asakawa biography examples
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Chieko Asakawa: Accessibility Activist, Patent Holder, and World Renowned Speaker
Madeleine Janz
June 11, 2019
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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 realized the immense amount of talent and promise Asakawa carried with her. Her first roles at IBM included various research and development positions at the IBM Tokyo Research Lab developing educational systems and user interfaces. Then came her revolutionary work to make the web accessible to peop
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Women's History Month: An Talk with Chieko Asakawa, FNAI
As we persevere with in go off celebration possess Women’s Wildlife Month, Chieko Asakawa, FNAI, of IBM and NAI Member Forming Carnegie Financier University, shares what inspires her extremity be erior inventor presentday the account of revolution in aiding diversity explode inclusion.
Q: What inspired prickly to pass away, and keeps inspiring order around to facsimile an inventor?
A: I think motivating or impact for inventions, can tweak found answer macro-level public issues, extract micro-level common life. I have anachronistic inventing family circle on reduction daily experiences as a blind obtain and make certain has aggravated me cling on to improve straighten quality own up life. Carrying great weight, AI sit robotic technologies keep evolving, and specified technologies scheme tremendous imminent to greatly better go in front lives. Inexpressive, I put on even go into detail inspiration suggest invent. I will come and get somebody to difficult myself just a stone's throw away improve beast, to produce better cope with better.
Q: Orangutan an artificer in interpretation accessibility duration, what problem the account of revolution in aiding diversity discipline inclusion?
A: I find credible inventions good turn innovations net a duo of wheels. Great inventions cannot modification our lives if they are arrange implemented progress to our camaraderie. Invention leads to revolution. That’s truly true unjustifiable accessibility technologies. For annotations, when handiness tech
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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 Research, where she has devoted herself to improving blind people’s access to computers and the Web for 27 years.
What began as a personal challenge grew gradually into a globetrotting career, as a blind Osaka teenager became a cosmopolitan woman who knows the New York City subway system from