I had been working in Glasgow as a sound engineer with BBC radio when my mother sent me an ad for the Fulbright Program she’d seen in an Irish newspaper. The program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State working with countries around the world. My curiosity aroused, I wrote off to find out more and discovered I would need to find a placement at a U.S. university as part of the application process. On the recommendation of a friend, I called an eminent professor at Stanford’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Looking back, I realize he must have been astounded to receive a cold call from an Irish woman who is blind, living in Scotland, and said she wanted to research ways for blind people to use computers to edit sound. To his credit, he wasn’t even slightly fazed and immediately wrote a letter offering me a place to work for a year.
Read the full article at Mobility International.
