When it comes to academic résumés, you can’t do much better than Central Kitsap High School senior Nicole Turcolini’s. School salutatorian, AP scholar, small business owner — those are just some of the hats Turcolini will wear when she walks with her CKHS classmates on June 12.

The next day, Turcolini will pack up those titles with the rest of her stuff and head south to Stanford University for the next big stage in her life — but not before taking a brief detour to software powerhouse Microsoft.

“I’m excited for the future, I’m excited about going off to college, I’m excited about interning at Microsoft this summer,” Turcolini said.

The determined senior has become a computer whiz during her time at CKHS and is planning to put those skills toward a degree in computer science at Stanford. The internship at Microsoft will no doubt help, but she’s already well-credentialed in the field.

She’s already running her own small business — a computer software company called AccessiSoft, which translates math equations into braille for the visually impaired — and has earned the praise of teachers and administrators at CKHS.

“She’s one of our top scholars in the school,” CKHS Principal John Cervinsky said. “She’s taken full advantage of everything we have to offer in terms of AP coursework for sure.”

And she’s done it all while overcoming her own visual impairment.

Turcolini lost her vision when she was 4, after being diagnosed with a cancerous tumor near her sinuses. The cancer left her blind, but it didn’t put a dent in her quest for success.

“What I find unique about her … (is that) she has a certain drive in her personality to succeed and become successful,” Cervinsky said. “She’s overcome a lot of obstacles to get where she is and that’s just, it’s inspirational to me.”

Turcolini is quick to give credit to the many people who have helped her during the years, including Cervinsky; AP computer science and physics teacher Dave Pevovar; Cindy Bayerd, the school’s specialist for the visually imparied; and Dr. Robert Shelton, a NASA programmer that mentored her in computer programming.

“I certainly couldn’t achieve what I’ve achieved without the support of the school and my parents and teachers,” Turcolini said.

She’s paid that kind of support forward with AccessiSoft.

There’s an entirely different code for translating braille math to the small braille reader that Torcelini normally uses to read text. Now that code is translatable.

“If I were to write the braille math on here and try to print it, it would just be in gibberish,” she said. “So what I did is I wrote a computer program — and it doesn’t work on here, but it works on computers — that translates the braille math code.”

Torcelini had to learn how to read the code and how to write it and plug it in to a computer program. For that, she got help from a mentor, Dr. Robert Shelton, a blind NASA programmer, whom Torcelini met at a summer camp.

She also had two years of AP computer science with Pevovar.

“She’s very, very self-sufficient,” Pevovar said. “I’ve watched her grow a lot over the last three years.”

More recently — and separate from the computer field — Turcolini has found support in Lexia, a guide dog she got about 10 months ago.

“With a cane you have to like find the object before you can go around it,” Turcolini said. “With a dog, you just go around it and sometimes you don’t even know it’s there. It’s a lot smoother. The dog can also take you around overhead obstacles, whereas a cane can’t find those.”

Lexia will accompany Turcolini to Stanford.

After that?

“I’d like to help improve accessibility in technology,” she said.