"The 3270s were what people were using we saw PCs coming on," Thatcher recalled during a telephone interview from his home in Austin, Texas. Thatcher later led the development of IBM Screen Reader/2, the first screen reader for a graphical user interface on the PC. This work culminated in IBM's announcement in 1986 of one of the first screen readers for DOS, called IBM Screen Reader. The PC was in its infancy, and, according to the biography that Thatcher provided for this article, he and Wright "started working on an audio access system" for the IBM Personal Computer in 1984. Those were the days that predated personal computers (PCs), with "dumb" terminals like the IBM 3270 that were connected to a mainframe computer and couldn't be coded or modified and were totally inaccessible to people who were blind or had low vision. He and Wright then joined IBM as mathematicians. In 1963, Thatcher became one of the first Ph.D.s in the then-nascent field of computer science. Jesse Wright, his then-thesis adviser at the University of Michigan, is blind. Like so many nondisabled people who become involved in the disability community, Thatcher had a personal connection: Dr. This auspicious anniversary is an appropriate time to look back on the pioneering efforts of IBM and what it plans for the future. In fact, our terminals became "talkies" just 20 years ago, in 1984, largely because of the work of Jim Thatcher, then a mathematician for IBM, the world's largest technology company. What you may not know, however, is that Screen Reader was once a proprietary product of IBM, rather than the generic term for the way people who are blind or have low vision gain access to computer screens. If you are reading this article, there is a good chance that you are using a screen reader, a term that is as generic to assistive technology as Kleenex is to facial tissues or Jell-o is to gelatin desserts.
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