John Boyer passed away on January 17. John was born blind and lost his hearing as a child. He devoted his life to promoting and developing computer applications that improved lives of people who are blind or deaf blind. John had a very special relationship with ViewPlus, and we will miss him greatly. ViewPlus teamed up with John to found the liblouis project and later the BrailleBlaster project.
Our vision for liblouis was an international open source library whose rules would be written and maintained by braille experts and that would be used by any person or organization in the world to produce good braille.
John Boyer was founder, architect, lead programmer, and cheerleader of liblouis. He and John Gardner led that project in its early years, until leadership was assumed by an international team led by Christian Egli of the Swiss Library for the Blind. John and we at ViewPlus are deeply grateful to Christian and the team for their excellent leadership that has made the original vision for liblouis largely come true.
BrailleBlaster is also an open source project whose goal is an excellent accessible user interface for creating and translating existing documents to braille. John Boyer played a similar role in founding BrailleBlaster as he did for liblouis. BrailleBlaster has also succeeded because of John’s work and because leadership was assumed by the American Printing House for the Blind. APH continues to refine and improve it.
John can rest in peace knowing that his works are jobs well done.