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The Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award

Letter of Recommendation Form
Thank you for your support of the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Awards program.
Please complete the form below to submit your letter of recommendation in support of the award nominee. Recommendations cannot exceed 800 words. You will not be able to submit your recommendation if the maximum word count exceeds 800 words.
Please note that recommendations should come from someone other than the person who nominated the candidate. Please note that required fields on this form are indicated by an asterisk (*).

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Please enter your letter of recommendation in the text area provided below: Thursday, April 13, 2023 Dear Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award Committee, I have worked alongside Neil Soiffer for the last three years as part of the W3C Math working group and am always impressed by his commitment to the blindness community. I first met Neil at the Summer University training workshop in Telch, Czechrepublic back in 2011 where he was demonstrating access technology trainers from around the world on how to use NVDA with Math Player to provide an accurate spoken mathematics experience. His latest work on MathCAT is outstanding, and I am encouraging companies and individuals building software to take advantage of this library of tools. I learned today that VISPERO is abandoning how JAWS interacts with math content and will be leveraging Math Cat in future releases. This I feel will be a revolutionary change for blind people and how they interact with math content within a Microsoft Word or other commonly used file format. What is even more commendable is that Neil Soiffer is doing all this development work on Math Cat without any financial compensation; there is no company funding this work. He is a true champion that every blind and print disabled person in the world should thank. Without his efforts, access to mathematics, chemistry, and STEM in general. Would not be developing as quickly as it is now. Moreover, with the latest releases of MathCAT, we can expect to have greater and greater access as more developers embed the libraries into their products. I am also delighted in his leadership in the MathML Working Group in the W3C. Recently Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge implemented support for MathML, and this means that now all the major browsers natively support the MathML specifications that Neil Soiffer have helped to develop through the years. I sincerely hope that the NFB will recognize the great work Neil has done over the many years by awarding him the Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award. Dr. Bolotin I feel would be proud of Neil Soiffer for his true giving heart to help blind people around the world. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions. Sincerely, Cary Supalo
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The Dr. Jacob Bolotin Award

Letter of Recommendation Form