ZoomText Keeps Teacher’s Career on Track

April 15, 2006

Cindi Brown’s story begins with an unusual family circumstance.  She is one of three children in her family born with Stargardt’s Disease*, a rare form of juvenile Macular Degeneration.  Cindi and her affected brother and sister have varying degrees of vision loss.  For Cindi, only recently has Stargardt’s begun to seriously effect her vision and her ability to perform at her job.

In the past few months we’ve introduced you to a few high profile ZoomText users, including Mark Davis, president of a Colorado ski school for the blind, and novelist Hunter Silvastorm.  This month we’d like to introduce you to one of our more mainstream users, elementary school teacher Cindi Brown.

Cindi’s story begins with an unusual family circumstance.  She is one of three children in her family born with Stargardt’s Disease*, a rare form of juvenile Macular Degeneration.  Cindi and her affected brother and sister have varying degrees of vision loss.  For Cindi, only recently has Stargardt’s begun to seriously effect her vision and her ability to perform at her job.

In her role as a special educator Cindi teaches reading skills to about 240 students.  She also creates education plans, requiring copious amounts of documentation.  When her vision began to decline in recent months, she found it increasingly difficult to perform computer-related tasks.  Her self-confidence began to erode as she struggled to produce error free reports.  She also began to wonder if she could continue to fulfill her commitment to her students, their parents and the school.

Fortunately for Cindi, her sister is Ai Squared’s own product support specialist, Maurie Hill, a long time ZoomText user and product expert.  When Cindi expressed fears about no longer being able to perform her job, Maurie hand-delivered a copy of ZoomText 9.0 for her to try.

Despite Maurie’s expert recommendation and urging, Cindi was not an easy sell.  Having used a lot of special education software with her students, Cindi was used to those students working at a slower pace.  She naturally assumed that using assistive technology software, including ZoomText, would also result in a slower work pace.  However, with a quick side-by-side training session, Maurie convinced Cindi that this was not the case.

In a single afternoon, Maurie walked Cindi through ZoomText’s magnification and reading features, including how to use typing echo and AppReader to produce error free documents.  With surprise still evident in her voice, Cindi told us “ZoomText stepped up to the plate. Not only can I write, edit and proof my own documents in a timely manner, with ZoomText on my computer, I am now finding typos that my co-workers make in their documents.”

Cindi also recognizes ZoomText’s usefulness as a teaching tool and plans to use ZoomText in her early reading classes.  “AppReader’s ability to highlight each word as it is spoken is a powerful asset to early readers.”

Now that Cindi is using ZoomText, her productivity is back on par with her sighted coworkers, and she no longer worries about the security of her job or her future as a teacher.

* For more information on Stargardt’s disease, visit: http://www.maculardegeneration.org/juvlong.html