AccessiSoft specializes in products Created by a Blind Student for Blind Students™
AccessiSoft was formed in 2007 by Nicole B. Torcolini, a blind high school student from Silverdale, Washington, to make available her first accessibility product, the Nemetex Nemeth Back-Translator™.
Nicole was attending Central Kitsap High School and had been taught to author her math work in the Nemeth Braille Code on her electronic notetaker. However, when it came time to print out her work to turn-in, her only two options were to print the Nemeth Braille Code on plain paper, which unfortunately required her teacher to learn Nemeth, or to emboss the work in Braille and have it interlined by a transcriber before turning it in.
In the summer of 2006, Nicole attended a University of Washington Vertical Mentoring Workshop for the Blind in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM), hosted by Dr. Richard Ladner, a renowned leader in access technology for the disabled. There, a visually-impaired PhD candidate, Sangyun Hahn, taught Nicole the LaTeX mark-up language as an alternative way to create her math work. Nicole also learned that LaTeX could easily be compiled by various applications and published in a Portable Document Format (PDF) file which could be easily read by a sighted person unfamiliar with Nemeth, LaTeX or Braille.
Having taken a few computer programming classes in the preceding years, including AP Computer Science, Nicole devoted the rest of that summer to creating, and that fall to testing with her class work, a Java-based program to back-translate the Nemeth Braille Code to LaTeX so it could be compiled for sighted readers. She named the program Nemetex--as in Nemeth to LaTeX--and began making it available to others in early 2007.
Nicole, also a childhood cancer survivor, currently attends Stanford University majoring in Computer Science.
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08/21/2011.
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