The New-Look ViewPlus Blog

By: Carolyn and John Gardner

We, the founders of ViewPlus, have accepted the challenge of writing the blog.  We will continue to post ViewPlus news and events, but the blog will also become a forum on topics relevant to ViewPlus’ mission.  We expect to be writing about accessibility and disability-related aspects of education, employment, math and science, health, government and probably a lot of other topics.

We will start this new venture with a few posts on our own history – how we became involved in accessibility research and development, why ViewPlus was founded, and the continuing challenges we will discuss in this space.  First, an introduction.  We are the founders and the two legally-required officers of ViewPlus.  John is President and Carolyn is Secretary of the corporation.  We were both academics when we founded ViewPlus in 1996, so don’t be surprised when we sound more like academics than business people.  We are who we are.

Carolyn: In my early career I was a first grade school teacher.  While mostly staying at home to raise our two sons, I also earned my masters degree in Reading Education and substitute taught for K-6 and resource rooms.  Next I went to Linn Benton Community College where I taught and directed Adult Basic Education (ABE) which included the study for the GED test and English as a Second Language.  I learned a lot about learning disabilities from teaching ABE, where many of my students almost certainly had undiagnosed learning disabilities or just learned in non-traditional ways.   At ViewPlus, I have been the “person in charge of making sure the bills are paid and generally getting things done”, ending up as CFO.  I transitioned out of the CFO position recently in order to have more time to develop educational products and materials, and co-author this blog.

John: I am a physicist who spent 30 years on the faculty of Oregon State University before retiring in 2003 to devote full time to ViewPlus.  I was born with one blind eye and various problems with the other eye.  In 1988 I had a minor eye operation whose purpose was to keep me from slowly going blind from glaucoma.  It worked.  I woke up after the operation blind.  I was able to take a couple of quarters off from classroom teaching in order to learn how a blind person can teach physics.  However I could not take time off from being director of my materials physics laboratory.  At the time there were about a dozen undergrad, MS, and PhD students, postdocs, and visiting faculty doing research in my lab, and they couldn't just stop and wait for me to return. So I had to learn quickly how to function minimally as a blind physicist.  Of course I continued to learn new techniques, but it did not take long to find that there were barriers that could not be overcome.  Not in the late 1990’s at any rate.

In the next few blog posts, I will describe the challenges of becoming blind and, in particular, the specific challenges facing any blind scientist at that time.  Carolyn will describe her realization that people with many non-vision disabilities have very similar accessibility needs to those of blind people.  These learning experiences were seminal events leading to the founding of ViewPlus and to its mission “Empowering people worldwide by making information accessible through innovative, inclusive technology solutions”.