President Riccobono: Our first presentation is one that I think you'll find very important. Even as we work to create built-in accessibility in the area of technology, we must recognize that there is a tremendous amount of expertise and value that comes in the access technology industry, and this morning we're starting off talking about what I dare to say is really one of the most significant and important tools that blind people use in accessing information that truly allows us to compete on terms of equality and work and other settings.
It's been about five years since we've had this company represented here on stage with a presentation, so it's a good opportunity to catch up. This company plays a very important role in providing access to information, and I would say its most important product in that regard has been JAWS for Windows. [Applause]
One of the important values I think that has been built into this product is that it's shaped and informed and directed by blind people. [Applause] This morning we have Ryan Jones with us, who has been with the company for seventeen years, but has worked in the access technology industry and as a trainer for even longer than that. You have probably gotten to know him at the booth or other places.
The second gentleman is Glen Gordon, and although you should know him, you probably know him better through the work he's put into the JAWS for Windows product because a lot of the work and design and thought that's been put into it has come from him. Since it is the thirtieth anniversary of JAWS [Applause], it's a number I like since it's also my thirtieth convention.
And you may have noticed they were distributing lapel pins that had a certain distinctive shape to them. I did know the shape because I did install JAWS that way in the beginning, so it's a real pleasure to invite to the podium from Vispero, Ryan Jones and Glen Gordon. [Glen and Ryan then walked on to the song “Baby Shark”]
Glen Gordon: Hi, good morning. My name is Glen Gordon, and I'm not saying that I'm old, but two factors that might conflict with that determination. One is I started working on JAWS before many of you were born, and number two, I have no idea of what that song was. [Laughter] So we will proceed.
I'm going to talk for the first portion of the session and then reflect a little bit about where we've been, how we got there, especially some of the early years of JAWS, and then I'll turn it over to Ryan Jones, who's our vice president of software, and he'll talk about exciting things that are coming up in the future of JAWS and screen reading in general.
It is great to be here with so many Federationists, people who helped make JAWS be the product that it is, both from using it and from giving us valuable feedback. I've done this for thirty-one years. I started in 1994 and I've learned a bunch of stuff, some of it more painfully than others, and I'm going to share some of those thoughts with you in the next few minutes. And woven into that will be some of the history of JAWS.
I was really lucky. About ten years before I started working on JAWS, I discovered that I was passionate about something. Well, I discovered I was passionate about something when I was seven, but that was radio broadcasting, and I decided early on that that probably was not the best way to make a living. So years later, I discovered that I was really passionate about software development.
And if I can offer you one big piece of advice: find something that you're passionate about and pursue it. Even if it's not “the best way for you to make a living,” if you're really passionate about it and you want to do that thing regardless of whether or not you're being paid, you're going to get good at it and you're going to be successful at it. That's my experience at least. [Applause]
And once you're passionate about something, get to know people working in your field, if only to call and ask them “Can we have a conversation? I'm interested in this field. What can you share?” If I had not gotten to know Ted [Henter] in 1986 when I got a Total Talk PC from Maryland Computing Services—Ted was the tech support training guy—if I had not gotten to know him and if he had not been so generous in sharing his time with me, I would never be working on JAWS.
I was the wrong guy. I knew nothing about screen reading. I was not well connected with the blindness community, even though I'm totally blind. But because I got to know Ted, we formed a friendship, we formed trust, and I did some side projects for him that allowed him to determine that maybe I would be a reasonable person to take a gamble on when it came to working on JAWS for Windows.
But whatever you pursue, there are going to be challenges. Things are not going to come easy. And the other thing that I learned first from interacting with my instructors at school, where I had to balance advocating for what I needed and communicating to them that I didn't want it any easier than my sighted peers, that's to learn to be resourceful. You don't need to have all the answers, but you need to figure out how you're going to get them, and don't make your problem totally somebody else's problem.
[Light applause] There is an element of doing your research, figuring out what the options are, and then ultimately you may need to ask somebody else to help you. But if they see you are invested, they will become invested and really want to help too. They will see that you're interested in something and that you've done your homework. And I bring this up now because when I first started working on JAWS for Windows, there were no good Windows screen readers. And so the question was how was I going to use Windows long enough to learn about it to help work on JAWS?
And the answer was—I'm willing to share this now—I ordered a free time demo of Slimware Window Bridge, which was the first rather primitive Windows screen reader. I would use it for fifteen minutes at a time because at that point I had to shut it down. There was an operating system called DOS that lots of blind people used, the operating system that we thought nothing could improve upon. Boy were we wrong! [Laughter and applause] And so I would use DOS to develop JAWS, I'd go into Windows to read the documentation I needed, go back to DOS, rinse, repeat, and that's how I began to bootstrap myself working on this.
When something feels overwhelming, do two things. This has been what I've learned. Don't procrastinate, because the longer you procrastinate, the more overwhelming it's going to feel. And take small incremental steps to gain confidence. Even if they're tiny, I have found over and over again that you feel amazingly accomplished for making the smallest stride forward. And in terms of JAWS, I knew nothing about Microsoft Windows when I started working on it. Well, how's the guy who knows nothing about Windows going to work on Windows?
Turns out Ted had a sighted programmer named Chuck Opperman working for him. Chuck loved everything Microsoft, he worked on Windows. He got the shell of JAWS for Windows working before I even joined the company. The problem is it would only work for about fifteen seconds, and it failed in really monumental ways.
But because he had created that framework, I could make small changes and small fixes and fix his bugs one by one by one over the first six months. And that allowed me to do two things: I gained confidence and I learned about Windows. And had he not done this, there would've been no way for me to have moved forward as fast as I did. It was a great way to sort of build up skills and gain confidence.
The next thing is that we all thrive when we're surrounded by people whose skillset compliments our own. When Ted founded the company, he was a visionary. He absolutely was. But the other thing that he did is he put together a brain trust of four of us who each contributed in really different ways and whose skills didn't really overlap all that much.
So Ted was the visionary. Eric Damery was a great salesperson, and even though he is sighted, completely embodied the blindness experience and was great at training. And we had Jerry Bowman, who's a former Honeywell HR executive, and he ran the company both from a personnel and a management standpoint. And with the four of us in those early days and then expanding out to hundreds of other people throughout the years, we formed a company of blind people largely for blind people entirely, and we continue to have people with overlapping and complimentary skill sets.
Turns out, by the way, that if you're developing a blindness product, having people who are blind working in the role of developers is a superpower. [Applause] And I say that because if one of us who's also a user is a developer, we're going to be more likely to discover problems early on before anybody else sees it. We're not going to discover all of them, but we're going to discover a lot of them, and we're going to be able to fix them without going through a couple of other layers of reporting a bug. So that's one of the superpowers. The other one is if you're blind, you are going to work and help design a product that other blind people have an increased chance of wanting to use and being able to use effectively.
So we were really lucky because as we became more successful, more blind people were interested in working for us, and one of those is in this room for sure. There may be others that I'm overlooking. I'm speaking of the man from New Zealand with that basso profundo voice, the great Jonathan Mosen. He originally talked to us on Main Menu and other internet properties and ultimately came in to manage our Pac Mate product, helped us refine our Braille implementation. He did so many things contributing to the legacy of JAWS, and he by all means was not the only one, but all because we developed a product that people saw a future in and wanted to be part of.
Luck and circumstance often play an important role. And I'll give you a few examples. There was something called Dueling Windows 1996. At that time, there was no real active internet. If you were blind, you had to hear about things firsthand from your friends and relations, and Dueling Windows at the CSUN Conference brought a lot of blindness companies together to demonstrate what we could do in Windows.
We worked really hard to be well prepared for CSUN. We succeeded there. We were the winning entrant, and that really got people talking about JAWS. We discovered Eloquence. It was the first fully functional software synthesizer, which allowed us to drop the price of JAWS because you didn't need a hardware synthesizer. That was something else that I think at the time was really revolutionary.
And there are more things I could talk about on this line, but I think given the time, I'll just move on and say that I fortunately felt compelled from the very beginning to make myself available to others even if it was “not my job.” If I could help someone, I wanted to be there. And I'll tell you one NFB-related story about that. Anil Lewis and I had a conversation back in 1996 or 1997. He was placing blind people in jobs. They needed a terminal emulator program to work, and he and I talked it through over an hour.
That's something that was easy for me to do. I was delighted to do it. I moved on. I completely forgot about it, and he's reminded me of this story time and time again. And so we never quite know the impact that we can have on other people. And providing training and support has also been one of our superpowers. We could not have done it without offering full service, right? Not everybody is a computer mastermind, nor should you have to be. But you need people who you can reach out to both for one-on-one and more generally to get training resources to become really good at software.
And our best advertisers have always been all of you, people who have been loyal to JAWS, and thank you, by the way, for all of that. [Applause] But even more important than your praise has been your criticism, has been your requesting features. That stuff matters much more than saying you like the product, because without that kind of feedback, we won't continue to drive to be our best. We won't think of some of the best ideas. It's that collaboration between you who use the product and those of us who were involved in making it that have really helped.
[Applause] I have loved the last thirty-one years. Even though I'm a “software fellow,” I'm not put out to pasture. I still get to work on interesting things, and I could not be more delighted that the person who's heading up our software division of Vispero and Freedom Scientific more specifically and leading us into the future is Ryan Jones. Here he is to talk about some of the things to look forward to in the not-too-distant future. [Applause]
Ryan Jones: Thank you, Glen, and thank you all for allowing us to be here. Don't tell Glen please, but in 1994 when he started, I was in middle school. [Laughter] But seriously, Glen is one of the most intelligent people and one of the most humble people that I've ever known. And it's a great honor to work with him. He actually, he may not remember this, but he was one of the first people who interviewed me when I applied for an IT job at Freedom Scientific in 2005. He interviewed me. I interviewed with several people.
I ended up getting a job doing training at the time, which I didn't realize that I loved training until I started doing it, but Glen was one of the first people I met, and we probably, based on the song that Mark had for us, we would consider him Grandpa Shark, I think. [Laughter] But even though I may be his junior, I still have no idea what the song means either. So let's be clear on that. But I'm Ryan Jones, vice president of software at Vispero. I've been in, as Mark said, in this field my entire career.
I've been using JAWS since 1999, so twenty-six years. I live in Kentucky, in Lexington, where's Kentucky at? [Applause] There they are in the back. I met a young lady this morning from Lexington that's been coming to convention since the early 1960s, ninety-three years young, Jan. So that was a great honor to meet her this morning. [Applause] Yes, it was amazing. Turns out she's practically my neighbor and we didn't know it. So that was a great blessing this morning.
What I've come to realize, both as a user of these products and leading the team that builds our products, is that JAWS isn't just code or keystrokes. It's the tool that enables us to participate in school, apply for jobs, and interact with the digital world around us, and also to connect with our friends, family, and loved ones. It's a lifeline to independence.
And over the past thirty years, JAWS has grown alongside of all of us as we've moved through different stages of our lives, from education to employment to retirement and all those things in between. JAWS has grown alongside many of us. And as we celebrate that legacy, I want to talk about where we're heading next and some of the things that we can look forward to and how the future of JAWS is being built with the same principles that got us here.
And these are some things that you heard Glen speak about, listening to our users, solving real problems, and never settling for good enough.
We're standing at the edge of a major shift in technology. I don't think that's any surprise to any of you, especially if you have listened to some of the other technology-related presentations this week. And as we all know, AI, or artificial intelligence, is not just a buzzword anymore. It's actually changing how we interact with the world for blind users. This shift has enormous potential to break down barriers that we've all lived with for too long, things like inaccessible graphics and images, disorganized web layouts and page structures, and the time and energy it takes to find that one piece of information in a sea of clutter. Has anybody experienced those problems before? Surely I'm not the only one.
[Applause] They're not minor inconveniences. The truth is they're the kinds of friction that wear us down over time, and AI gives us a new way forward. But here's the thing: Tools only matter if they're built by those of us who need access to them. And at Vispero, we believe that AI should be used in ways that respect your autonomy and your privacy, amplify your productivity, and reflect your real-world experience. And that's why our approach to AI in JAWS is shaped by the people who use it, from engineering to support, training to QA.
As Glen said, many of us across this team are blind or low-vision. There's not one department that I oversee that does not have multiple, if not entirely made up of, people who are blind or low-vision. [Applause] And I intend to keep it that way, and I intend to move that forward and then only increase the amount of blind and low-vision people that work on my team, because I find that they're some of the best workers that I could ever dream to employ.
And it's because they don't just design things, they actually rely on them. We all rely on them as we build them and test them and help shape the user experience from the inside out. Many of us know the phrase “nothing about us without us,” and that's not just a slogan for our team. [Applause] When blind people are involved at every level, the results are just better. The technology is stronger, and we all benefit.
Now, we all remember, or we may remember, the acronym of JAWS, Job Access with Speech. So let's talk about the workplace for a moment. One of the most important places that JAWS shows up is at work. Whether you're a software developer or a customer service agent, a teacher or an entrepreneur, whatever it is that you do, accessibility at work isn't just about fairness. It's about being able to do your job with the same speed, accuracy, and confidence as your peers. [Applause] We've all heard that accommodations are about “leveling the playing field,” but what we are really aiming for in JAWS, what we actually believe in, is making blind professionals not just equal participants, but dominators in your jobs, in your careers. [Applause] We designed JAWS not just to “get the job done,” but to do it efficiently.
And this is really about productivity, and productivity equals power. We know that when technology slows you down, it impacts how you're perceived by your employer, your coworkers, and even yourself. That's why we focus on reducing steps, eliminating guesswork, and helping JAWS users move at the speed of thought instead of at the speed of remembering things. AI makes this more possible than ever before. If AI can summarize what's on a webpage or answer your question in three seconds instead of thirty, that's time saved, that's mental load reduced, and that's energy you can put towards actually doing your job and not just figuring out how to use your computer and your screen reader.
And as Glen said, of course, none of this actually works without your feedback. That's why we recently launched, in March, the Insert J Club. Any members out there, Insert J Club? [Applause] Good. There's still plenty of room. This is a new initiative to connect with more of you, our users, our testers, and our community of experts. It's a space where you can learn more about what we're working on in our products, tell us what's working, and more importantly, tell us what's not working for you and help shape the direction of future updates to our products.
We don't want to guess at what you need. We want to hear it, because the people who use JAWS, ZoomText, Fusion every day are the people who should be steering where it goes next. [Applause] So if you haven't joined yet, I encourage you to sign up. Go to freedomscientific.com/insertjclub, and you'll be hearing from us about opportunities in the future to shape the direction of where we're going.
Now let's focus our last attention around some AI advancements upcoming. This mindset of co-creation or building with you, and not just for you, has already shaped many of the tools that you use today. Tools like PictureSmart AI. Any users out there? [Applause] Excellent! Which can describe everything from family photos to complex charts and diagrams. I will say that this personally has revolutionized my ability to do my work.
Or FS Companion. Any FS Companion users out there? [Light applause] Excellent. FS Companion provides step-by-step keyboard instructions in response to natural language questions on how to do things with JAWS, ZoomText, or Fusion, and the applications you frequently use like Microsoft Office products. And now we're taking this a step further. Very soon JAWS will be able to summarize the content and layout of a webpage.
That means no more guessing about what's on the page, no more digging through headings just to get oriented of what's there. And even better, it will allow you to ask questions about what's on the page in plain language. Questions like, “Does this restaurant menu have vegetarian options? Summarize this article for me. Show me the text of the page without all the stupid advertisements and links that are all over the page.” [Applause]
You can use that prompt, by the way, it will work if you say the word “stupid.” Because we've all felt the pain of this, haven't we? We've all felt the pain of trying to find something on a page that's cluttered with things that's in our way. JAWS will answer clearly, concisely and quickly.
And we're not stopping there. Coming in September, we'll also be releasing support for multi-line Braille displays. [Applause] And you may have gotten a chance to see JAWS working with products like the Monarch here this week. We know this has been a longstanding request for those of you in our community. For those of you who use multi-line Braille displays, this is a whole new paradigm for access to Braille, and I don't think I've ever seen so much excitement from our team that develops and tests Braille support as they've been working on multi-line Braille. This is all coming, and we're really excited for you to get your hands on it.
So let me show you where this is all headed. You're about to see a short video demonstrating JAWS summarizing and describing and interacting with two live webpages, the restaurant page of the Marriott Hotel, where we are now in New Orleans, and a Wikipedia article about the Marriott Hotel. So let's go ahead and play that video now.
Video Narrator: We've all faced challenges when navigating web pages: extra links, buttons, advertisements, popups, page refreshes. They all get in the way sometimes of finding that one piece of information that you're looking for. Coming in the fall of 2025, FS Companion will now be able to describe and summarize webpages, bringing useful information right to your fingertips so you can find exactly what you're looking for, better understand the layout of a webpage, and even get personalized tips on how to navigate the page. Let's try it out. I'm on the Marriotts Food and Dining page here at NFB2025.
JAWS voice: New Orleans French Quarter Restaurants, vertical Bar, New Orleans Marriott.
Video Narrator: Let's have FS Companion give me a summary of the page.
JAWS voice: Creating page summary. Page summary one. The page is structured with a top navigation bar that includes links to different sections like Overview, Gallery, Accommodations, Dining, and more. There is a main content area focused on dining options at the New Orleans Marriott featuring various restaurants and their details.
Video Narrator: Not only can we have it give us the summary and structure of the page, we can also ask questions. Give me a summary of the food options.
JAWS Voice: Enter. Give me a summary of the food options. Here are the dining options at the New Orleans Marriot. List of five items, one, 55 Fahrenheit, list of three items, nesting level one, cuisine, American. Description: enjoy handcrafted cocktails and light bites or shared plates.
Video Narrator: Maybe I even want to find out what restaurants are open at 10 PM. Let's give it a try.
JAWS Voice: Type your quest. Enter. What options are open at 10:00 PM? Blank at 10:00 PM? The following dining options are open at the New Orleans Marriott at One: 55 Fahrenheit, open until 12:00 AM. Two, Canal Street Burger, open until 12:00 AM every day. Three, Canal Street Pantry, open until 12 AM every day.
Video Narrator: All right, thanks FS Companion. Now let's check it out on a Wikipedia page.
JAWS Voice: New Orleans Marriott, national, Wikipedia.
Video Narrator: Let's see if FS Companion can help us out on the Wikipedia page for the New Orleans Marriott.
JAWS Voice: Creating page summary. Page summary one. The page provides information about the New Orleans Marriott, a forty-two dash story hotel located in the central business district of New Orleans, Louisiana.
Video Narrator: Alright, let's check it out and ask a few questions.
JAWS Voice: Type your question here, edit, enter.
Video Narrator: What are some key facts about the hotel?
JAWS Voice: Enter, what are some key facts about the hotel? Here are some key facts about the New Orleans Marriot. Bullet, location: 555 Canal Street, Central Business District, New Orleans, Louisiana, the United States. Bullet, floors: forty-two stories. Bullet, completion: built in 1972. Bullet, Architects… [Fades out]
Video Narrator: Thanks, FS Companion. Coming in the fall of 2025, webpage summaries and questions with FS Companion, brought to you by JAWS. [Applause]
Ryan Jones: Alright, what you saw isn't just an experiment. It's real, it's working, and it's on the way. But thank you. Even the most productive features only matter if you know how to use them. And that brings me to something I'm also really excited to announce. Starting in August, we're going to be launching a new training series focused on helping you take advantage of AI tools, not just inside of JAWS, but across the board. That includes Chat GPT, Gemini, Copilot and more.
Because we believe the people who learn to use AI well will be better positioned for success: success in school, at work, and in life. And we want blind users to be at the front of that wave, not playing catch-up. [Applause] This training series will meet you where you are and help you go further. Whether you're brand new to AI or only experimenting, we'll give you hands-on practical guidance to make them work for you.
So as we close, where does that leave us? It leaves us energized. It leaves us grateful for the journey that you've shared with us so far, and it leaves us with a clear sense of purpose for the next thirty years of JAWS, in which we will use the same convictions that we've always used: that technologies should adapt to you, not the other way around. And that blind people will be involved in every stage of the process, from idea to design to support to leadership. We will build better things. Thank you for your trust. Thank you for your leadership, your advocacy, your support, and your partnership. The road ahead is bright. We are happy to walk with you, and we look forward to the next thirty years. Thank you. [Applause]
President Riccobono; All right! Let’s hear it for JAWS for Windows! [Applause]