I think most of us like to hope that when our time is up, in some small way, we will have left this world having made it a better place. Jonathan Sharp, who died last Sunday at the age of 67 after a lengthy illness, was an exceptionally quiet, humble man. Yet he vastly improved the lives of blind people worldwide, even though most of them may not know his name.
This brilliant new Zealander was unquestionably one of the giants of the blindness technology pioneers, and arguably the most unassuming of all of them. Those of us who know our blindness technology history refer to Jonathan as “the father of KeySoft”, the software package that has powered many products released by Wormald International Sensory Aids, Pulse Data International, and now HumanWare. There is no other person who could possibly claim that title.
Jonathan was hired in the 1980s by the brilliant access technology entrepreneur Russell Smith. His first project was to take an off-the-shelf Epson HX-20, and develop something revolutionary – a portable talking computer that a blind person could use. When I say portable, by the time Wormald International Sensory Aids had done all the necessary modifications, it weighed about six pounds. But the independence it facilitated was so profound that I don’t remember anyone complaining about the weight. If a blind person was fortunate enough to own one of these devices, gone were the days when a blind person had to Braille their work, then type it for a sighted teacher or colleague, without being able to verify what they had typed, or even if the ribbon had run out. Instead, blind people would be able to write, format, edit and then print or emboss their own documents.
It is important to put this development into historical context, because it makes it all the more remarkable. Jonathan developed this tool in an era when most households didn’t own a computer, and laptops for business users were practically unheard of. Thanks to him, blind people were using an effective portable solution well ahead of such products being available generally.
Clearly there were technical issues to resolve, and I don’t downplay the significance of those. But where Jonathan was exceptional, where his genius really showed, was in his ability to create elegant user experiences. Jonathan, who was not blind, did it by doing a lot of listening, and then asking more thoughtful, probing questions. He never assumed that he knew what was best for blind people. Perhaps nudged along regularly by one of Russell’s favorite questions, “how hard can it be”, he turned blind people’s dreams into a tangible product we could use.
In 1986, every character of code was precious, because space was so limited. Yet Jonathan set out to create a device that anyone could use. You didn’t have to be technically inclined to use a Keynote.
There were three secret ingredients to Jonathan’s recipe.
First, an intuitive menu-driven system. Arrow through your selections, or use first letter navigation, plus plenty of shortcuts for those who prioritized efficiency.
Second, consistency. Long before graphical user interfaces were commonplace, Jonathan had worked out that if you want a user interface to be intuitive, you had to make sure that whenever possible, things worked the same way across applications.
Third, and most important, remarkably comprehensive context-sensitive help. The detail in that help was truly extraordinary. It meant that someone who might in the past have been frightened of computers could learn at their own place and pace, and would soon be writing beautifully-formatted documents.
I suppose that after having rescued a few teachers from the vagaries of our Apple IIE installation which included a VersaBraille, it was decided that I might be a good test case to use a Keynote for my schooling to see what happened. This I duly did starting in 1986. It may not surprise many people to know that I had a few opinions about how the software might be improved, and it was these opinions that were held with the forthrightness and certainty common to many teenagers that connected me with Jonathan Sharp.
I was in awe of Jonathan. He would have been in his mid-20s when I got to know him, and to my teenage self, he was like this magician who made incredible things happen. I cringe a little now when I think of the time I would spend making a long distance call to him, me in Auckland, he in Christchurch, and how much of his time I would occupy. He was incredibly patient and polite, treating me with courtesy even though I’m sure some of my ideas were completely uninformed and ridiculous.
I do have a favorite Jonathan story from this era. One day at school, I made a discovery that very much appealed to my teenage self, and couldn’t wait to get home so I could call Jonathan to show it to him. The original Keynote contained a row of function keys, one of which was the keyboard voice button. If you pressed it, the voice, which was based on the Artic Technologies 263 chip back then, would say, “keyboard voice, currently…” and then whatever the voice was set to. At this point, you had three choices. If you pressed the letter f, you would turn the keyboard echo completely off. If you pressed W, you would set it to word echo. And if you pressed S, you would set it to spell, which echoed every character. So I called Jonathan, with my Keynote keyboard voice set to spell, and I breathlessly said, “hey Jonathan! Listen to this! This is so cool!” And I pressed the keyboard voice button which confirmed that it was set to spell, so it was echoing every character. Then I pressed the key to turn keyboard echo off, F. And the keynote said, “F, off”. Well, Jonathan must have been utterly mortified, because when I got home from school the next day, a floppy disk was waiting for me in the mail, and after I installed the software update it contained, it wouldn’t say “F, off” anymore. Jonathan had obviously put the phone down and taken care of it right away.
Even in the early days of Keynote, it was possible to install third-party utilities, although there was no publicly available software development kit. Jonathan wrote a little app for the Keynote called KeyTerm which changed my life. He explained to me what a modem was, and what I could do if I bought one. I had to try. So, I bought a modem, fired up KeyTerm, and never looked back. I used it to connect at considerable expense to the CompuServe information Service, and that is how I discovered the National Federation of the Blind, which transformed my life even from half a world away.
Eventually, the rest of the world caught up with what blind people were already doing, and laptops became more common. Jonathan ported KeySoft to DOS, allowing it to run on a Toshiba laptop, and exit to DOS where you could run any application you liked.
Many people are not aware of Jonathan’s remarkable contribution to the screen reader industry. Pulse Data International developed a screen reader for DOS computers called MasterTouch. It worked particularly well with the Keynote Gold speech synthesizer, which, while perhaps an acquired taste like a lot of text-to-speech of that era, had accurate pronunciation, was highly responsive, and intelligible at fast speeds. If you remember the DOS screen reader era, you may recall that there were two common methods of writing text to the screen. If text was written through the computer’s BIOS, screen readers had no difficulty speaking text automatically. However, increasingly, developers wrote software using direct screen writes. While faster, text written this way could not be spoken automatically by most DOS screen readers and required some sort of review technique. Jonathan was able to find a way around that. MasterTouch was one of only a small number of screen readers that automatically spoke direct screen written text.
Another innovative element of MasterTouch was its optional touch tablet, long before the era of touch screens we take for granted today. Because screens in those days were a predictable 25 lines by 80 characters, Pulse Data developed a device that let you run your fingers across the virtual screen, and hear the characters under your fingers. It played a critical role in giving those of us who were users spatial awareness of the way the screen was laid out.
All this in the early 1990s. If you used a software application often enough, you could get very efficient working this way, because you could place your finger where you knew relevant text would appear. It was well ahead of its time. Touch the screen to find out what was there. Typical of Jonathan’s work, it contained robust context-sensitive help, so people could learn the system.
Jonathan continued to quietly change the world. He played a pivotal role in creating the underlying architecture and expanding software feature set of BrailleNote, the first version of which was released in 2000, powered by Windows CE. With that strong KeySoft inheritance at its core, it was utterly disruptive, becoming the dominant player in that market segment in a remarkably short time.
Jonathan was instrumental in changing the way blind people travel, working with Mike May and Charles LaPierre of the Sendero Group to bring truly portable GPS-based navigation to the blind. With care and thought, he brought an external package into the BrailleNote family in a way that preserved the user interface elements that were so critical to the BrailleNote’s success. We take it for granted now, but it is hard to overstate the sense of awe many of us felt at being able to ride a bus or taxi, or walk an unfamiliar street, and be told all the businesses we were passing and the names of the streets we were approaching.
When Pulse Data started sounding me out in 2003 about managing their blindness products, working with Jonathan, someone I viewed as a hero and a mentor, was a massive drawcard. In the three years that I worked closely with Jonathan, he taught me so much. I was the product manager, and I had opinions. Sometimes, Jonathan would enthusiastically work with me to realize what customers were telling me was needed. At other times, he would challenge me to think differently about the need for a feature, or the way I wanted it to work. When he did so, he almost always had the better idea, and when Jonathan spoke, I knew it was right to always listen. But he also knew that as one of KeySoft’s original users, I got the paradigm he had created. We made remarkable progress during that time. We worked with Baum’s hardware to produce the cute and powerful BrailleNote PK, added a raft of new features to KeySoft, and of course the crowning glory, BrailleNote mPower, which no one knew about until the day it was ready to ship.
Jonathan continued to make a difference for many years, and his clarity of thought around user interface for blind people has impacted products well beyond those he developed directly.
I kept in touch with Jonathan from time to time and we would reminisce about the old days. He would kindly reach out every so often, just to check in.
The Blind community has lost one of the greatest technologists that has ever worked with us. The world has lost a gentle, humble, good soul. But I know that Jonathan would want me to mention those he loved. Let us extend our love and condolences to Heloise, Julia and Peter, Nick and Grace, Joseph, Susanna, Lois, and David.
Last year, I was contacted by a teacher in New Zealand named Ruth, who asked if I would speak virtually to her class. It turns out she is Jonathan’s niece. It wasn’t until she read my tribute on the 20th anniversary of Russell Smith’s death that she gained a greater understanding of what a significant figure in blindness technology Jonathan is. I can well imagine that. He never tooted his own horn.
It will not be a comfort now as the family grieves, but I hope in time, they will take great pride in the fact that Jonathan changed the world for the better. Many blind people pursued an education more successfully, or held down a job, or realized with delight that they could use a computer after all, specifically because of Jonathan Sharp. I am sorry beyond words that he has gone, but that is one amazing legacy to leave.
Thank you for everything, Jonathan. I will miss you very much, but it was an honor to know you.