Tait Hoyem
I have three goals in my software development career:
- Strong adherence to the UNIX principles of software design.
- Security, privacy, and anonymity of the internet.
- Accessibility of technology to the visually impaired.
These goals can often be expressed in a shorter way: "keep it simple; everything else will follow." Some of my projects reflect these goals; others are just fun along the way. I have all of my code projects hosted on my Github.
Projects
Here is some of my best work:
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Odilia Screen Reader — Primary contributor to a new screen reader for Linux, written in the Rust programming language. Using git to collaborate with other developers from around the world. Using the AT-SPI accessibility standard over the DBus communication protocol. As part of this project, we also submit upstream library contributions to fix long-standing accessibility bugs.
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atspi — Primary maintainer of the Rust language library for the AT-SPI specification. Using syn to create procedural macros and code generation. Follows semantic versioning (semver) v2.0, and uses automated Github CI tests to enforce high standards for code contribution. This library is also used as part of AccessKit, a library to implement accessibility for GUI applications in a cross-platform manner.
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Semantigram — Imagine each student in a classroom can read a chart in the best way for them: one may use a simple table, the other a visual graph, and yet another will listen to an audio stream changing pitch to indicate the value over time. That is semantigram.
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Simple Markdown Editor — A simple online (and offline) browser-based markdown editor that supports the automatic creation of accessible math (MathML). Written in Javascript with the KaTeX library.
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Lichess — A patch for Lichess.org which vastly extends support for screen reader users. Written with Typescript and Scala. Lichess.org has millions of active users.
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Programming Tutorials For The Visually Impaired — Amateur-level production quality videos with all file buffers, written text, and shell commands read out by Emacspeak, an Emacs extention for the blind.
I also occasionally put some content on my blog
Contact
You can reach me via email at tait@tait.tech.
If you use PGP, download my public key.