Vista Testimonial Alice Turner
Transcript
ALICE TURNER: Hello, Sight Tech Global. Name is Alice Turner, and I am the Director of Community and Corporate Relations for Vista Center. My journey with Vista Center actually began back in the 1990s. I was working, at that time, for a large organization in the Bay Area as the training and development manager. And so for me, I have a congenital eye condition. And what that means is that all through growing up, through school, through college, through establishing my career, I had a progressive loss of vision. And what that meant, for me, is that I needed to adapt and cope, adapt and cope, until I no longer had the skills to adapt and cope. And that's when I turned to Vista Center. It was one of the best decisions of my life.
What Vista Center and the highly professional staff did is that they taught me access technology, how to travel safely, how to manage my life, how to manage the daily living tasks. But most importantly, they gave me back the confidence and the confidence that I thought that I had lost forever. So essentially, I was retooled.
And then, I returned to my job-- I loved my job-- for another eight years, as a blind professional. After a little bit of time, I decided to contact Vista Center to do what I thought was going to be volunteering. And as it turns out, there was a position that was open at that time. That was 14 years ago, and I joined the Vista Center staff. And currently, I serve as a senior manager on the leadership team.
One thing that my journey taught me is that access technology levels the playing field for people who are blind or visually impaired. I am sure many of you in the audience know this, as well. So with this in mind, several years ago, Vista Center started a corporate partner program. Through this program, we serve as consultants and subject matter experts with many of the technology companies that have been represented on the stage during this conference. We provide them with the information and the expertise, from a research point of view to see if a product is viable, or to establish if an existing product needs to be modified for people who are blind or have low vision.
I have had the privilege of working on the planning team for Sight Tech Global, and through this development of the conference, I know that the relationships that we have established with the companies represented on this stage will continue long past the event. So I ask you, has your curiosity about access technology and AI been piqued throughout this conference? I certainly hope so.
So I want to thank the technologists, the designers, the researchers, and the advocates who have so passionately brought their expertise to the stage and shared their information with us. And I also want to thank the generous donors and sponsors. Your donations go directly to Vista Center, and that will enable us to serve the thousands of individuals that we serve every year. And I want to thank you, as a participant, for joining the first Sight Tech Global, and I invite you to come back for every subsequent Sight Tech Global that we will have in our future. So thank you.
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