Figure out a different way
By: Olga Lucia Collazos
That is what Tamara Rorie answered when I asked her advice about what I should tell vision impaired people who want to become entrepreneurs. Tamara, who is blind since birth, is an attorney who worked for several different companies and one government agency before opening her own private practice, nine years ago.
Tamara's Path
Tamara was born in North Carolina and lived there until she graduated from Law School. She studied in a public school where, from first through sixth grade, she was taught Braille once or twice a week.
Then in seventh grade until graduation a teacher helped her, two times a week, to get worksheets, tests, and other materials in braille, and to order books in braille and on tape.
When Tamara finished high school she chose to attend the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she studied Political Science. After graduating and working for awhile in sales, she decided to study law at Wake Forest University at Winston Salem. She was naturally interested in law, but Tamara also thought that a legal degree would allow her to have her own business in the future. Although her studies required a significant amount of reading, she was not discouraged. Study groups were a great help because classmates offered to read study material aloud to her. In addition, she used a computer and scanner, and also made use of the available assistive technologies in the 80s for vision-impaired people. This assistive equipment included such items as a braille printer, a digital tape recorder, and devices called Versabraille and Braille n' Speak, which could be used to take notes, store and organize information. Even with help from classmates and technology, the amount of reading required was a tremendous challenge, but Tamara rightly recognized that the ability to read was not the only important thing, as she expresses with the following phrase: “Reading with your eyes means that you can read, but that is different from being able to comprehend.”
