Long before Valen Systems, Troy Mallory was one half of a two-student software team in Whigham, Georgia. The team was called Red Eagle Fenv.
The work began with stories told by Muskogee elders. Troy and his teammate David McCormick wanted to preserve those stories in a form that people with different physical and cognitive needs could use without assembling a collection of separate tools.
They built a Windows application, a story database, a custom text-to-speech system, and the framework that joined the experience together. What began as a cultural preservation project became a solution to a much larger systems problem.
A program built to open technical careers
Red Eagle Fenv was part of High School/High Tech, a career-development program for students with physical, cognitive, and learning disabilities supported by the U.S. Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy.
Georgia's 2004 annual report identified Red Eagle Fenv as the first Native American High School/High Tech program in the nation. The program was organized in Whigham to reach Native American students who had been underserved by existing programs.
The 2006 state record names the program's site coordinator as Marian McCormick, chief of the Muskogee Creek Tribe in Tama Tribal Town. Current Georgia tribal records identify her as Chief Marian "Vonnie" McCormick.
The same report says the program's name came from the Muskogee word for bridge. Its purpose was practical: connect young people to technical opportunity while keeping them connected to their community and culture.
The stories gave the framework a purpose
Troy and David turned Muskogee stories told by tribal elders into an electronic book. The stories lived in a database on CD beside the application that opened them.
Inside that application, the team brought together StickyKeys, the Windows screen reader, font-size control, contrast control, and the other accessibility systems available in Windows XP. They also connected the framework to third-party assistive software such as Dragon and built a text-to-speech system that could switch between languages.
A reader could move through one application and control how the stories looked, sounded, and responded. The Georgia Department of Labor described the result as a fully functional, bug-free Windows application.
That unified application became Red Eagle Fenv's entry in Microsoft's 2006 Accessible Computer Program Development Competition.
First place at Microsoft
Microsoft hosted the 2006 Accessible Computer Program Development Competition for Georgia High School/High Tech teams. Each team worked with a Microsoft representative and a Georgia Department of Labor sponsor. Microsoft's requirement was direct: the finished program had to be DAISY-5 compliant.
Red Eagle Fenv won first place. The runner-up built an early app store before the category had taken shape in the market. Troy and David won by solving accessibility as one connected experience.
They traveled to Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington, presented the program to Microsoft staff, and received a $5,000 grant. A later federal High School/High Tech program guide reproduced the project as an implementation example.
The later history we’re still documenting
The public records cited on this page establish the program, participants, application, competition result, trip to Microsoft, and grant. They don’t independently establish a later licensing agreement or the application’s exact relationship to Windows Ease of Access.
Troy’s firsthand account is that Microsoft licensed the framework from the Tribe and that its architecture informed the unified accessibility system that followed Windows XP. That account is part of the company’s history, but Valen Systems hasn’t yet published the primary licensing records, Microsoft correspondence, or contemporaneous technical documentation needed to verify the later claim publicly.
We’re working to recover those records and an original copy of the application. Until that evidence is published, the competition and application are documented history; the licensing and product-line relationship are clearly labeled as Troy’s account.
The same instinct continues
Red Eagle Fenv started with a story problem and uncovered a systems problem. The accessibility features existed, but the system around them didn’t know how to make them work as one.
Troy has carried that instinct into the systems work he leads at Valen Systems: find the parts a computer treats separately, understand what that separation costs, and build the architecture that lets them work together.
Public sources
The records and publications below cover the program, competition, participants, application, and trip to Microsoft.