Teréz Vaspöri

At the age of 7, an explosive device exploded in his hand in his home village; since then he has been completely blind, and his left arm had to be amputated. In 1972, he graduated with a degree in programming in Numbers; later he also passed the intermediate state language exam in English. From 1972, he worked at the Computer Center (OTSZK) of the National Planning Office, where he developed system software.

In 1980, he moved to the Measurement and Computing Research Institute (MSZKI) of the Central Physics Research Institute (KFKI) of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Here, he first rewrote parts of the CEDRUS interactive Job preparation system from Fortran to Assembly language in order to reduce response times. Later, as part of the Tokamak project, he wrote a disassembler for the KMC-11 microprocessor communication system.

Meanwhile, he also had to deal with working as efficiently as possible - blindly. That is why he wrote the very first text-to-speech system specifically for the blind in Intel8085 assembly language. Later, he rewrote it for new formant processors, and the entire code for Intel 8086. Thus, his fellow citizens could also benefit from the system he had intended for himself. BraiLab Basic was used by 400 people, BraiLab Plus by 70, while BraiLab PC was used by 2,000 people. These systems are protected by Hungarian patents granted for the process and equipment.

After the reorganization of her workplace, she moved to the Computer Network Center of the KFKI Particle and Nuclear Physics Research Institute, where she worked until December 2012. She also created Braille shorthand coding systems, which were used by the Association of the Blind and its schools. She participated in several European Union projects. She mostly worked together with her husband, András Arató, in her work. As a retiree, she is an external collaborator of the MTA Wigner FK Rehabilitation Technology Research Group.

His work was recognized by the National Academy of Sciences and Humanities with the Kalmár Award in 2002.