A Perfect Match with Ai Squared
Who would have guessed that an innocent question from someone with a curious mind would eventually turn into a spectacular match. Back in the late 1990’s when Maurie Hill was a new ZoomText user she called Ai Squared for assistance. During the call, Maurie and Ai Squared’s support specialist, Cathy Gettel, were chatting and Maurie asked, “Do you like your job?” Cathy answered, “I love my job”. It was a passing question and answer, but Maurie filed that information away.
Maurie is one of six children in her family, three of whom have Stargardt’s Disease, the most common form of inherited juvenile macular degeneration. Prior to being diagnosed with the disease Maurie struggled as a slow reader in school. Looking back, she realizes that her reading difficulties were an early indicator of her vision problem. Nonetheless, these difficulties never stopped Maurie from setting and achieving her goals.
Following high school, Maurie attended Vermont Technical College where she earned an associate’s degree in Electronics and Electrical Engineering. Afterward, she accepted a position at Digital Equipment Corporation in South Burlington, Vermont. When first employed by DEC her job involved intricate cutting work on circuit boards. Later, she became a field service technician working with a team that was responsible for the computers in the DEC manufacturing facility.
It was during this period of her career that Maurie noticed she needed more and more light to work on the computers. Most of the DEC employees put their computers under their desk. She found it difficult to get the amount of light needed to remove the back off the unit and pull the appropriate circuit board. She was also beginning to have trouble recognizing faces when she met co-workers in the hallway. Still, her condition remained undiagnosed.
Later, Maurie left DEC and took a job as an instrument technician at Wyeth Nutritionals. She was no longer expected to crawl under desks to work on PCs, but she did find herself working in low-light conditions where she was expected to differentiate between black and red wires. With her failing vision this work was very difficult.
About this time, Maurie’s eyesight took a major dive and she was finally diagnosed with Stargardt’s Disease. Since she was the first of the three Hill siblings to learn she had Stargardt’s, the news was quite a shock.
Maurie didn’t want to spend her whole career squinting at wires in dark corners, but what could she do? She decided to move from being a hands-on tech to a tech that used a computer. She learned PLC programming so that she could troubleshoot tech issues more easily, keeping her out of the dark areas of the plant.
In her personal life, Maurie missed being able to read novels. She contacted the Vermont Association for the Blind and Visually Impaired to inquire about books on tape. That opened up the world of assistive technology to Maurie. Geoff Howard of the VABVI came to Maurie’s office to install ZoomText. While he was there, Geoff contacted Ai Squared for assistance. It was then that Maurie learned that Ai Squared was located just down the road in Vermont.
With ZoomText, things were really coming together for Maurie. She had a broad range of computer skills and an accessibility tool that allowed her to work on a par with her sighted peers. But she was not happy working in the factory environment in Jeffersonville, Vermont. She recalled her conversation with Cathy Gettel and her words, “I love my job”. Maurie thought how cool it would be to work at Ai Squared. It became her new goal. Reminiscing about those days, she says, “I’ve never had such a mission. I wanted that job so badly.”
To Maurie’s good fortune, a short time later Ai Squared posted a job opening which she immediately responded to. A few interviews later Maurie was invited to become part of the Ai Squared team. She immediately proved herself becoming one of Ai Squared’s top-notch product support specialist. She is a gem of a technician, a strong user advocate, an insightful beta tester and she’s never without a smile.
Cathy Gettel reflects, “Boy, am I glad I told Maurie Hill the ZoomText user that I loved my job, so that she could eventually become Maurie Hill the Ai Squared employee and my close friend.”
You can meet Maurie Hill in Ai Squared’s booth at ATIA 2007 later this month in Orlando, Florida. If she’s not in plain sight, look under the table, she may be tracing wires. Black and red wires of course.
