Reflections on the Career of a Vision Rehabilitation Therapist: 1975-2007

When I was asked to write about the rewarding profession from which I recently retired, I was flattered and eager to begin writing. However, when I sat down to put my thoughts into some semblance of order, I was surprised to discover that it was a much larger task than expected. I decided to simply tell my story, with the objective of describing the wonders of having spent a life's work in vision rehabilitation therapy. The first half of my life was spent preparing for and conducting research in plant pathology. Many people come to blindness and low vision studies from an unrelated field, but not many spend time in their first profession peering down at 300-micron worms through 1000x magnification! At age 30 years, a hunting accident resulted in total vision loss and ended my career in science, but opened the door to my real love--vision rehabilitation therapy. The skills gained in my pursuit of scientific research, combined with earning a post-doctoral master's degree in vision rehabilitation therapy, teaching in a rehabilitation center, and experiencing my own journey of adjustment with blindness, were training for my days in personnel preparation and research. Following those days of early learning, I taught in the Vision Rehabilitation Therapy program at Northern Illinois University and then at Western Michigan University for 29 years. VISION REHABILITATION THERAPY: STATE OF THE ART, 1975 Two aspects of my 30-plus years in vision rehabilitation therapy strike me as significant: the phenomenal change in the technical tools of the profession, and the development of the profession itself. Perhaps the simplest way to approach the changed technology is through the writings of Father Thomas Carroll, the chaplain of the post-World War II blind rehabilitation unit the Army's Experimental Rehabilitation Centers in Connecticut and Pennsylvania. Fr. Carroll's "20 losses," which he spoke of in his book Blindness (1961), provide a useful context to explain the significance of developments in technology. Three of these losses were of particular interest to me, both as a therapist and as a consumer, when I began my practice in vision rehabilitation therapy: Loss of informational progress--that is, my clients' and my own inability to keep up with the news, current events, and so forth; loss of ease of written communication--the problems that vision loss imposes upon the tasks of reading and writing print; and loss of activities of daily living--the difficulty of performing tasks needed to sustain an independent lifestyle. Following my own vision loss, I certainly viewed my inability to read such items as the newspaper, community bulletin boards, scientific journals, and marquees of movie theaters as serious losses. Similarly, losing the ability to compose a simple manuscript on a (then) state-of-the-art typewriter was devastating. In addition, figuring out where to get goods and services, particularly clothing and other personal items, locate a store's telephone number, and then figure out how to travel to and find the store were beyond what I considered to be simple barriers. When, as a vision rehabilitation therapist, I went about attempting to convince new clients, now known as customers, that there were good "work-arounds" for these three losses, I did not have much to offer in the way of sources of local news and information, unless there was a radio reading service in the area. Other reading resources were the Talking Book Program for books and some magazines; and a few really talented souls were reading with early closed-circuit televisions or Optacons (electromechanical devices that presented print in vibratactile arrays). Customers used typewriters to compose print documents although it was far from easy. Getting consumers to retail stores was more complex and required elaborate audio maps recorded on audiocassette with descriptions of store layouts, hand-in-hand work with an O&M specialist at the store, and the tasks of obtaining the telephone number and directions and making a route to the store. …