Berkeley Systems

Berkeley Systems was a San Francisco Bay Area software company co-founded in 1987 by Wes Boyd and Joan Blades. It made money early on by performing contract work for the National Institutes of Health, specifically in making modifications to the Macintosh so that it could be used by partially sighted or blind people. Several of these Access programs were licensed by Apple Computer and added to the operating system. Perhaps the most ambitious of these technologies was a program that could read the Macintosh screen, called Outspoken, which won a technology award from the Smithsonian in 1990.