When someone loses their vision, question number one is often "How am I going to continue?" Continue to experience new things? Continue working in a job that I enjoy? Continue to work toward life goals? As we’ve heard previously from ZoomText users, perseverance is helpful in overcoming the challenges of being visually impaired.

Karen Barlow is an assistive technology business owner who lost most of her vision and eventually one of her eyes to diabetes. Having only one eye with 20/400 acuity and a prosthesis has not stopped Karen from experiencing new people, places and other life opportunities. In fact, she is enjoying her work and life now more than ever.

Karen’s path to becoming a business owner began while teaching at Rogue Community College. As a college professor with low vision, enlarging her teaching materials was essential to perform her job. Over time, the task of creating and carting around bulky large-print materials became increasingly difficult. She realized it was time to seek out a more practical career. When a job opportunity came up with MicroAge Computers, Karen was eager to move away from academia into the business world.

While working at MicroAge, Karen was assigned the task of installing and learning ZoomText to train a visually-impaired draftsman. The minute she saw the program, she became a ZoomText user herself. Karen found ZoomText was a perfect mix of technology. She could change the screen colors for better contrast, set the pointer to a color and size that made it easily identifiable, and use ZoomText’s speech output to read documents with ease. With ZoomText as her accessibility software, she could see herself doing what she’d enjoyed for years, earning a living by teaching. 

One of Karen’s life goals was to own a business. While working on the business plan for her own computer training company, a job offer came from Goodwill Industries. Karen decided to put the dream of her own company on hold and take the position with Goodwill. Five years with Goodwill allowed her to develop her teaching style and ready herself to take the plunge. Finally, a year ago this month, Karen left Goodwill Industries to open Barlow’s Computer Training.

In her business, Karen trains both sighted and low-vision computer users. When she meets with a low-vision client, Karen encourages them to jump right into ZoomText. “I teach them the basic commands; how to start ZoomText, zoom in and out, and read documents with AppReader” says Karen. “I also make a hotkey chart in large print that they can refer to. Because ZoomText is user-friendly, it typically takes just one lesson and the user is off and running.” 

Karen is thrilled with the smoothing capability in ZoomText 9.0. No matter the style or color of text on-screen, “xFont” makes it clear and easy to read. She sums it all up, “ZoomText has made it possible for me to continue working. Being able to work has helped me deal with losing my sight. Working with the disabled community has given me vision.” 

Karen laughingly tells us, “For this 58-year-old diabetic, life is good.” It’s been quite a process for Karen, but she believes that everything she’s gone through has been absolutely necessary to get her where she is today.

Karen, we wish you continued success in your business and travels, and commend you for all that you do for the low vision community in Oregon.