Background
Asakawa was born with normal sight, but after she injured her optic nerve in a swimming accident at age 11, she began losing her sight, and by age 14 she was fully blind.
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Chieko Asakawa
Edit Profile浅川 智恵子
Education
In 2004 she earned a Doctor of Philosophy in engineering from the University of Tokyo.
Career
A Netscape browser plug-in which she developed, the International Business Machines Corporation Home Page Reader, became the most widely used web-to-speech system available. She is the recipient of numerous industry and government awards. She earned a bachelor"s degree in English literature at Otemon Gakuin University in Osaka in 1982 and then began a two-year computer programming course for blind people using an Optacon to translate print to tactile sensation.
She joined International Business Machines Corporation Research with a temporary position in 1984, and became a permanent staff researcher there one year later.
Achievements
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Asakawa was added to the Women in Technology International Hall of Fame in 2003. She became an International Business Machines Corporation Fellow, International Business Machines Corporation"s top honor for its employees, in 2009, becoming the fifth Japanese person and first Japanese woman with that honor. In 2011 the Anita Borg Institute for Women and Technology gave her their Women of Vision Award. She was a keynote speaker at the Fourth International Conference on Software Development for Enhancing Accessibility and Fighting Info-exclusion (DSAIE 2012). In 2013 the Japanese government awarded her their Medal of Honor with Purple Ribbon. A paper she wrote in 1998 with Takashi Itoh describing their work on web user interfaces for blind people was the winner of the 2013 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGACCESS Impact Award.
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Born
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Nationality
Japanese
Awards
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Women in Technology International Hall of Fame IBM Fellow Anita Borg Institute Women of Vision Award Japanese Medal of Honor
The Medal of Honor is the United States of America's highest military honor, awarded for personal acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty.The Medal of Honor is the United States of America's highest military honor, awarded for personal acts of valor above and beyond the call of duty.