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Bailey1 Well my first uh entry into the field of disability was uh when I was working
at a research… as a research assistant for a for profit uh consulting firm. They had
uh many divisions and I was assigned to the education and training unit and um my first
project had to do with um the evaluation of state agencies for the blind and visually
impaired. I was an assistant just doing uh assistant work and um actually um after that
particular project um there were other grants that the organization um wrote for uh and
received uh based on the experience of people in the firm. And so since I had worked on
this particular grant having to do with uh visually impaired and the blind then my resume
was used for other uh programs that uh were related to disability. So that was kind of
like my first entry into the disability field. So tell us a little bit about Edutech. Um
well the um as um I evolved from the uh position uh as an assistant with the um project having
to do with blind and visually impaired um the consulting firm also received a grant
from the U.S. Department of Education on education technology. Um we had a number of individuals
who were working on Special Ed technology projects at the time and I was assigned to
work with this group uh and the project was um Edutech. Um there were some great people
uh Susan Elting, uh Sharon Raimondi um they were my mentors um when I worked there at
the consulting firm. And we worked on that project for uh probably about three years.
And um we were providing information to teachers uh administrators around technology and how
they could use technology to teach students with disabilities. Okay. It was an exciting
project. Uh it was very new. Uh technology was new at the time and certainly there was
nothing to do with uh Special Ed technology on the market. So a lot of the adaptations
that we um talked about or provided information about had to do with uh… um probably solutions
from regular ed. Um you know the uh computers were big and clunky at the time. Um but they
were useful. There was no software um on the market. Um but at that time you began to see
some of the software being developed for people with visual impaired and software for people
with learning disabilities. Software for people with you know whatever the disability was.
And so it was really an exciting uh time. Uh probably between uh 1983 and 1986 uh was
the period uh in which we were sort of adapting regular uh technology to fit uh Special Ed
technology solutions.