In 1995, Giesbert Nijhuis was touring Europe with his ska-reggae band when his van tumbled off the road. The accident left Nijhuis paralyzed from the neck down. He was 26 years old.

“I couldn’t move anything except for my head, and only had an eighth of my normal breathing capacity. There was almost no hope of healing or repairing the spinal cord,” says Nijhuis, a professional graphic designer and photographer. “At first I was questioning if I wanted to continue life like this.”

David Niemeijer, a friend of Nijhuis’ since childhood, remembers that dark time well. “His new physical challenges drained the life right out of him.”

The accident affected every part of Nijhuis’ life, including his livelihood. To edit images on his Mac, he needed to be able to enter key combinations, but the assistive onscreen keyboards available at the time didn’t allow for that. In his new situation—or his “second life,” as he likes to call it—he was facing serious accessibility issues.

So Niemeijer, who has a degree in agricultural and environmental sciences and was working at a university at the time, created his own assistive keyboard—what would become the Mac app Keystrokes. He soon scaled back his work at the university to focus on founding a software company, AssistiveWare, which released pioneering accessibility tools for the desktop.

And then came the launch of iOS, which changed everything for Niemeijer by untethering assistive software from the desktop. In 2009, just a year after the iOS Software Development Kit launched, AssistiveWare released its breakthrough product, Proloquo2Go—which later came to Mac, bringing Niemeijer full circle.

Proloquo2Go gives a voice to those who have difficulty speaking—proloquo is Latin for “to speak out loud”—by presenting simple drawings you tap to create sentences; the app reads those sentences aloud. But instead of providing a limited number of predetermined sentences and phrases, Proloquo2Go lets you combine words in infinite ways.

“It allows people to not just use utilitarian language, such as asking or answering questions,” says Niemeijer, “but also to share stories or emotional anecdotes. It allows them to tell a joke.”

The portability of the iPhone and iPad made this assistive technology more widely available: “It used to be that you’d get an expensive machine when you were 7 or 8 years old,” says Niemeijer. “With an iPad or iPod touch, you can start around 2 or 3 years old, which makes a huge difference, because some kids then can go to regular schools and are not reliant on special education.” And with the Mac version, you can use the same app on every device.

AssistiveWare currently has a half-dozen apps available across Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. For example, Proloquo4Text (Mac and iOS) is an augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) app that can speak for you, and Pictello (iOS) lets you create storybooks using text-to-speech and the photos on your device.

Nijhuis is proud of what Niemeijer has managed to build. “I love having seen David’s works grow from the software he made just for me to the company it is today, serving so many people all over the world.”

The designer continues to influence AssistiveWare’s evolution: He created the company logo and the app icon for Proloquo2Go.