Randall Walker, MD, is a practicing physician, clinical investigator, and educator at a College of Medicine in Rochester, Minnesota. In the mid-1990s, he became aware of subtle visual problems in young people (and himself) that impaired their reading performance, especially from computer displays. Having minored in modern language as an undergraduate at Notre Dame, Randall collaborated with his brother Stan, an ophthalmologist, to improve text readability with a new text formatting method, called Live Ink.

Randall and Stan designed Live Ink to promote the dynamic perception of word groups in a sentence, and to augment comprehension with multidimensional syntactic cueing patterns. Randall then collaborated with Phil Schloss, BSEE, an expert in natural language software and a former advisory software architect at IBM, where, during a distinguished 30 year career, he had patented 14 inventions of his own. Randall and Phil developed and encoded software-executable algorithms that perform the Live Ink formatting method automatically.

The team then collaborated with cognitive and education scientists at two leading universities to validate Live Ink, and received Phase I and Phase II Innovation Research Awards from the US Department of Education. The globally-patented Live Ink method is now featured in upper-elementary, secondary, and college level online textbooks, and received the 2005 Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers.