Blindness made working as a mechanical engineer difficult. When he consulted Florida’s Division of Blind Services, a counselor told him that computer programming was becoming a popular career for people who are blind.
Henter went back to school for a degree in computer science. He learned to program by typing code out on the terminal and having a volunteer read the screen back to him. A local high school student read programming books for him, which he recorded and listened to on tapes. “That was pretty slow and tedious. But I learned how to program computers,” says Henter.
It wasn’t until his first job when Henter got what he calls a “talking computer.” This ancestral screen reader, created by Deane Blazie, could only read one character at a time. (For example, the word “PRINT” would be pronounced not as one syllable but as “P-R-I-N-T.”)
Nonetheless, this was a game changer. Henter could perform his job without any assistance. When the next version — one that could read a word at a time — came out, Henter regularly called the company for tech support and became the most known user. Blazie, the head of the company — who would go down in history as one of the few sighted pioneers of the assistive technology industry — soon offered him a job. Years later, Henter recalls Maryland Computer Services with warmth, remembering a welcoming environment and colleagues who respected him.
Henter was both an engineer and an advocate for the product. He was sent on a trip to Chicago to train a high-profile customer — a businessman named Bill Joyce — on using a screen reader. An explosion in an industrial accident had left Joyce blind and partially deaf. The two men became close friends, bonding over their love of water skiing. (Although Henter had missed the chance of becoming a motorcycling champion, he would win the gold medal as best overall skier in the 1991 World Disabled Water Ski Championships and six national championships.)
While training Joyce, Henter would throw ideas around the features he’d like to add to screen readers. Eventually, Joyce proposed that they create a company together.
In 1987, they founded Henter-Joyce and soon released the first version of their screen reader for DOS. They called it JAWS, which stands for Job Access With Speech, but is also a playful reference to another DOS screen reader called Flipper, like the dolphin in an eponymous 1960s TV show.
JAWS was not the only screen reader in the market, but it had original features like the dual cursor — one application cursor for navigating elements on the page and another that could move freely like how our eyes move around the screen. It also had built-in Braille support and a scripting language for users to customize their workflow.