A thriving global business has been developed by a former teacher working on how to bring visual aids into the multi-media age.

Up to three years ago Dr Bob Gomersall was head of physics at Bradford Grammar School.

Now he is chairman of Bradford Technology Limited - a growing firm which produces educational CD-Roms sold around the globe.

He used his interests in science and teaching to start a company developing hearing testing equipment for the medical profession in 1985. The firm, which was set up with help from his father at his Morley home, soon also became involved in developing CD-Roms as teaching tools.

In the late 1980s he involved fellow physics teacher at BGS Bernard Lowe in the venture and in 1992 moved to the Bradford Business & Innovation Centre where he was able to employ former BGS pupil Mark Rouse who wrote software from scratch.

At that time it was known that CD-Roms held a lot of information, but they developed them so that they became multi-media disks which allowed the user to see pictures, video, sound, graphics and animation on screen.

It wasn't long before they started selling a wide range of educational CD-Roms to schools and colleges around the UK and then overseas.

As the range of CD-Roms grew, the firm grew by 40 per cent a year which allowed it to employ its current 22 staff - involved in sales and technical development - and a similar number of people working on a contract basis.

The firm develops a gold disk with all the information on it and sends to a firm in Rochdale which produces a master disk it uses to press the thousands of CD-Roms from.

The company now produces all the AA's CD-Roms including travel guides, route planners and a selection of lifestyle packs. The firm also bought the rights of the Mr Men characters to produce a series of CD-Roms which teach Key Stages 1 and 2 English and Maths in the National Curriculum.

At the other end of the scale it produces CD-Roms on thermodynamics and molecular physics, mechanics and mechanical oscillations and waves.

Dr Gomersall said: "We have always hired the best people and this firm has grown so far, and will grow in the future, by allowing good people to work to the best of their potential without getting in the way."

The firm is now so well respected he was chosen to be one of the 12 chairmen of the Regional Innovation Strategy - heading up the multi-media and software board.

His aim is to help other companies develop in a similar way to his own by targeting Government funding their way.

This way he expects hundreds of jobs to be created in a sector which is set to really boom in the next few years with Bradford and the Yorkshire region leading the way.

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