

This confusion has led many to contact the software developers seeking to speak to, interview, or book Mavis for an event. Mavis Beacon is often thought to be a living or historical figure by the public. Mavis has been compared to American cultural icon Betty Crocker and has been called "the Betty Crocker of cyberspace".

As of 1998, she had instructed 6,000,000 school children. Throughout the 1990s, Mavis Beacon served as the virtual typing instructor at numerous American schools. Mavis Beacon has been seen as groundbreaking for being one of the first computer instruction characters and for being a female African-American embodiment of computer software. Since its introduction, Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing has been the best-selling instructional typing software. However, once the popularity of the program became evident, many of these distributors reversed their decision and began to display the line of software bearing Mavis Beacon's image.

There have been several models chosen to represent the confident efficiency of Mavis Beacon her image changes to represent a "modern professional typing instructor." īecause Mavis Beacon is a black woman, some retailers were initially reluctant to display the product. Mavis's name comes from a combination of Mavis Staples (one of the software developer's favorite singers) and the word beacon (an allusion to her role as a guide to typing). The model chosen to be the face of Mavis was Haitian-born Renée L'Espérance, who was discovered working behind the perfume counter at Saks 5th Avenue Beverly Hills by one of the software developers in 1985. Developed to be a personification of a Software Toolworks instructional typing program, Mavis Beacon debuted as simply a photo of a model on the software's packaging in 1987.
