Since I haven't actually done this yet, it's probably about time I did. I am Joseph, in case you for some reason didn't bother to read who this message is from. ;) If you're actually on campus from time to time, you might have seen me - I'm hard to miss. White hair, white cane, huge backpack.

I'm 24 and legally blind. I was introduced to the keyboard before I could even spell my name, and have basically been touch typing (or rather some close approximation) since I was about eight. I never learned Braille, and although reading large print can sometimes cause very nasty headaches, the alternative, speech access, is just too slow for me.

I am a game coder in my spare time, which is almost nil lately. I've never been any good at most genres of games, but I have nonetheless wanted to make them. I've been programming since I was about eight, and am competent in C, C++, Objective C, and Python. I am acceptably good with Java and PHP. I will deny, if asked, that I know anything about Perl, any form of Basic, COBOL, Fortran, or Forth.

I'm a bit of an interface nazi as well. I've used enough of them that I am quite convinced that nobody out there today knows how to make an environment that isn't lame and complex for the users - this includes MacOS, MacOS X, all versions of Windows, BeOS, OS/2, anything UNIX-based I've had the opportunity to use, and the Amiga. Please try not to take me bashing any and all of these too seriously since on some level they're all wrong in various ways, even if each get one or two big things right.

I used to think myself a career programmer, but the more I think about it, it seems my biggest area of interest in the CS field is more in the field of figuring out how people think and building environments which conform to people's thinking processes rather than trying to make people conform to the way the computer does things. The more research I do in this area, and the more people I work with on these issues, the more clear it has become that this is indeed a very hard problem. Perhaps this is why nobody has gotten it right yet? =) Studying it seems to be a lifetime's work.