Tait Hoyem

Experience

Software Developer

Matthew Campbell — May 2023-October 2023

Designer, developer and project manager of freedesktop.org's global Accessibility Portal. The portal solves multiple long-standing issues for accessibility on Linux, including support for screen reader key bindings in Wayland desktop environments and a permissions system similar to Android.

Accessibility Consultant

Oxfam Canada — December 2022-May 2023

Brought in to fix accessibility issues related to meeting WCAG 2.0 AA standards based on an audit by a third-party. Use of advanced Wordpress add-on functionality along with completing detailed reports of the work done through git commits.

Instructor

Southern Alberta Institute of Technology — June 2022-December 2023

Instructor for courses covering everything from project and team management all the way to full-stack web development (LAMP, HTML, CSS, and JS).

Founder

Bytetools Technologies Inc. — 2020-present

Providing institutions and individuals with the latest accessible technology in the form of transcription services and diagram creation tools. Using WCAG standards and the Rust programming language to produce structural-text and physical tactile diagrams for the blind.

Software Developer

Zone4 Systems Inc. — June 2021-December 2021

Software development and QA for an international race timing company with a small team. Testing using Python's unittest and Selenium. Development done in Javascript and Tornado. Used the Bitbucket issue tracker and git service along with weekly team meetings to manage and discuss new ideas.

Education

Bachelor's of Science in Computer Science

University of Lethbridge (2023-2025)

Focusing in applied sciences, including studies in text-to-speech systems and embedded audio driver development.

Diploma in Information Technology

Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (2019-2021)

Full-stack software development diploma. Focusing on databases, interface design, systems administration, security, and enterprise networking.

Projects

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Skills

Languages

Programming Languages

Frameworks/Environments/Libraries

Miscellaneous & Hobbies