One day in the ‘90s, my mom tripped on a rug in a department store.  She went down.  Her glasses broke and sliced into her eye.  She was already blind in her other eye from another trauma ten years earlier.  Without ability to detect light in either eye, she was blind and, at first, inconsolable.

I wrote a simple program that helped her learn how to type on the computer.  She had never typed before.  She couldn’t even tell if the computer was on or off.  I showed her how to detect the home row.  We rigged the keys up so that her first tap would produce audio saying the letter of the key.  A second keystroke would enter that character into a file.  My sons made the recordings of each key’s letter — Ricky for the capital letters and Billy for the lower case.  Brother-in-law, Manuel, recited the punctuation keys.

We hooked up her typing with code to automate Microsoft Outlook.  She could choose email recipients and send messages.   Received messages would go into a queue that she could access.  She could listen to them using text-to-speech functions.  Everything was controlled by my FoxPro program.  She could also listen to articles from the local newspaper and get definitions of words from Merriam Webster.

It was a bonus late in life for her and for me.  We worked together.  She was the tester and I was the programmer.  I never would have been able to clear aside so much quality time for us had I not also been practicing my skill.  She used her demonstrations of the “Talking Typer” as a way to line up visitors — just like I am now doing with the memoirs. I wrote an article about our invention for the FoxPro Advisor.