Jamie Teh and Mick Curran are software developers and musicians from Brisbane, Australia who met when they were kids at a music camp for the blind, where they bonded over a shared love of computer programming and music. They are now both married with families of their own and have remained close friends. Nearly two decades ago, they started one of their most important projects that would help change the world for the better while building a community of dedicated people.
In 2006, Mick took a break from college to work on an idea he had for screen reader software. He knew the high price was keeping many blind people from finding jobs or using a computer, and he wanted to change that with software that would always be affordable for everyone. He asked Jamie, who’d recently graduated with a degree in IT and was working full-time, to help him develop it. Jamie was excited to collaborate, despite his initial uncertainty about how successful they could be with software so many companies had been working on for years.
For the next year, Mick and Jamie worked together to create an open-source screen reader known as NVDA, or NonVisual Desktop Access, for computers running on Windows. A year later, Mick attended the CSUN Assistive Technology Conference hosted by the Center on Disabilities at California State University, Northridge. When Accessibility teams from major tech companies, including Microsoft, expressed interest in integrating NVDA with their platforms and browsers, Mick and Jamie knew they had a winning product. That year, they founded NV Access as a nonprofit organization to support the development of NVDA through funding and grants, and continued to attend CSUN for many years.
NVDA soon became available on GitHub as an open-source screen reader for Microsoft Windows, allowing a global community of contributors to develop the software with the latest updates and add-ons.
