Blind software developer
Christopher Toth
I’m a blind software developer who’s spent ~15 years building tools the accessibility community relies on. I made NVDA Remote, Qwitter, Chicken Nugget, and QRead, and I run mongoose.world, a MOO. These days I work across audio and speech, formal reasoning, and AI tooling.
Now
- Qlatt Making the formant synthesizer explain itself, and checking it against DECtalk.
- Barn and the Mongoose stack The Go MOO server, the browser client, and the conformance suite that keeps them honest.
- claudio sound packs Seven themed packs so far: Star Trek bridge, sonar, retro arcade, synthwave, crystal, zen, and workshop.
- Formal reasoning libraries Argumentation frameworks, belief revision, subjective logic and provenance, as small pure libraries that compose.
A few things I believe
- Accessibility is engineering, not charity. Blind people are users. Don’t build a separate “accessible version” off in a ghetto; make the defaults right, so it’s harder to be inaccessible than accessible.
- Public means public. The open web shouldn’t make you prove you’re not a dog to read a page.
- Words have meanings. When every scrape is “theft” and every moderation call is “censorship,” the words stop working, and then the real thing happens and everyone’s too tired to notice.
- The work is noticing a problem is a problem, and then actually solving it, with code. If you don’t have that second part, you’re not done.
What I’m thinking about
The exciting thing about AI isn’t speed. It’s that the people who were locked out can finally build their own software. There are maybe a dozen blind programmers; now any blind person can prompt their way to the accessibility mod that would never have been written otherwise. I rebuilt an FPS I hadn’t been able to play since I played it with my dad, him driving and me shooting. Multiply that by every small community the default software was never built for. I also think this is the most important and most dangerous thing happening, and I try to hold both at once.
Things I've made
Accessibility
-
Free, open-source remote access for NVDA: connect to any Windows computer running the screen reader. Built with Tyler Spivey after a 2015 crowdfunding campaign, and used across the blind community.
-
Accessible ebook reader.
-
Accessible, full-featured podcast player.
-
Accessible RSS feed reader.
-
Instant lookups (definitions, translations, stock quotes) from a single hotkey.
-
Qwitter and Chicken Nugget Retired
Accessible Twitter clients.
Audio and speech
-
Audio feedback for AI coding agents. Hooks into Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI and others, and plays a contextual sound for each tool start, success, failure and completion, so you can hear what the agent is doing. Comes with themed sound packs.
-
A speech-synthesis workbench: a Klatt formant synthesizer running as WASM AudioWorklets in the browser, driven by a declarative text-to-speech frontend written as YAML rule packs. Every decision is explainable: ask why a segment got its duration, or why a rule didn't fire, and get the provenance trace. Ships a faithful DECtalk 4.63 frontend and an oracle harness that compares output against real DECtalk.
-
A high-level Web Audio library for games and apps: HRTF 3D positioning, per-voice occlusion, filters, synths, sound groups, microphone input, streaming and caching, with each AudioWorklet loaded only when first used.
-
A fully specified, interoperable profile of W3C SSML: defined fallbacks, diagnostics, and lowering rules for each vendor's dialect.
Mongoose and MOOs
-
The MOO I run: a multiplayer text world where programmers kick back and build silly things together. Visit as a guest from your browser.
-
A MOO server written from scratch in Go: lexer and parser, bytecode compiler and VM, task scheduler, built-in function registry, TCP server, and a reader/writer for ToastStunt-format databases. Its behaviour is compared against existing MOO servers with a shared conformance suite.
-
Browser client for Mongoose with GMCP, MCP and MCMP, 3D audio and optional text-to-speech.
-
Portable YAML conformance suite for MOO language implementations, run against any server over TCP.
AI and developer tooling
-
Plugin for Claude Code, Codex CLI and Gemini CLI that retrieves, reads and annotates scientific papers into a cross-referenced collection.
-
Post-mortems of real incidents where an AI coding agent assumed, panicked, hid bugs or ignored instructions, and the rule that would have prevented each.
-
Session-aware guard for AI coding agents: CEL rules, auto-maintained state, multi-agent support.
-
CEL (Common Expression Language) to JavaScript transpiler.
Formal reasoning and languages
-
Formal argumentation frameworks and semantics: Dung, ASPIC+, bipolar, partial, and revision.
-
Propositional belief revision: AGM, Spohn ranking, iterated revision, IC merging.
-
Subjective logic: opinions, Beta evidence, multi-source belief fusion.
-
Green provenance semirings: provenance polynomials, why-provenance, tropical cost.
-
Defeasible Datalog.
-
The RTLola runtime-monitoring language, in Go.
Books
Mostly science fiction, the idea-first kind. Currently reading The Wandering Inn by pirateaba. Some five-star reads:
- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Robert A. Heinlein
- Excession Iain M. Banks
- The Freeze-Frame Revolution Peter Watts
- A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky and the rest Vernor Vinge
- Steel Beach John Varley
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Eliezer Yudkowsky
- A Practical Guide to Evil (books III to VI) ErraticErrata
- Callahan's Crosstime Saloon Spider Robinson
- The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War Fred Kaplan
All 31 five-star reads
- The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Robert A. Heinlein
- Stranger in a Strange Land Robert A. Heinlein
- Time Enough for Love Robert A. Heinlein
- Excession Iain M. Banks
- The Hydrogen Sonata Iain M. Banks
- The Freeze-Frame Revolution Peter Watts
- A Fire Upon the Deep, A Deepness in the Sky and the rest Vernor Vinge
- Steel Beach John Varley
- Summerland Hannu Rajaniemi
- Dissidence Ken MacLeod
- Woken Furies Richard K. Morgan
- Project Hail Mary Andy Weir
- Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality Eliezer Yudkowsky
- A Practical Guide to Evil (books III to VI) ErraticErrata
- So You Want to Be a Villain? ErraticErrata
- The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized ErraticErrata
- Callahan's Crosstime Saloon Spider Robinson
- The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Douglas Adams
- Ender's Game Orson Scott Card
- Little Brother Cory Doctorow
- Pirate Utopia Bruce Sterling
- Artemis Philip Palmer
- 2010: Odyssey Two Arthur C. Clarke
- Trinity's Child William Prochnau
- All Our Wrong Todays Elan Mastai
- The Gone World Tom Sweterlitsch
- A Wrinkle in Time Madeleine L'Engle
- A Wizard of Earthsea Ursula K. Le Guin
- Chasing Shadows: Visions of Our Coming Transparent World David Brin and Stephen W. Potts (eds.)
- The Bomb: Presidents, Generals, and the Secret History of Nuclear War Fred Kaplan
- John Dee and the Empire of Angels Jason Louv