Steve Jobs - He made a blind man see

Steve Jobs tribute Magazine Cover 70s 80s 90s

There has been a lot said today about the man who shares my first name’s sake.  He was a visionary, and a creative genius, but to me had helped me see.

I always had a great respect for Apple when I was growing up.  Even as a young kid I understood the fascination with Apple.  Granted in the 90’s Apple didn’t have the greatest track record, and I had a few ribbings at Apple’s expense, I still knew the impact the company had on the world.

Cut to 2005, I was starting college and I had a problem.  I needed a laptop and the one I had purchased a year or two previous was on it’s last legs.  Plus it was hard for me to see.  I started to have eye strain and back problems because being visually disabled I had to hunch over really close to the screen to see anything.  I was frustrated and I didn’t want to go through that pain any longer.

At the time as I was looking for laptops, I was going through the Disability office at my college and a professor had mentioned to me they can provide zoom software to help with my vision.  I tried a lot of software, cheap ones, really expensive ones, none seemed to work.  I even tried hardware enhancements to see if they would work and none did.


So on a lark, I looked to see what Apple had.  Sorry to use a bad pun, but the wool finally lifted from my eyes.  I saw a Zoom feature as part of the Accessiblity features built into Mac OSX.  It was perfect.  With a few keystrokes I was able to zoom in to the screen, the screen would move with the mouse and I could sit back like normal people and still able to see everything I needed to.  There was and still is no other software that had come close to what Apple had just built into the Operating System!  It wasn’t even a feature that a lot of my tech friends even knew about and it wasn’t even a prevalent feature on Apple’s website.  

I told my professor this at the Disability office and not only was he so impressed with the software but he started recommending macs to all of his visually disabled students for purchase.

Ever since then, I have never looked back.  I became an Apple user and I still am to this day.  All that through Steve’s vision.

I don’t have a lot of fancy words or even analogies from when I worked at an Apple Store that would sound better than this:  Steve Jobs changed my life, he made a blind man see, and I’m sad he’s gone.

Here’s to the crazy one.

I miss you Steve.