You Know You are a Veteran TVI When…

1. You remember being so excited about the invention of the glue gun so there wasn’t long waits for Elmer’s glue or puff paint to dry.
2. You remember using MS-DOS so your students could write and save files on computers with speech access.
3. You remember BEX as the talking system for an Apple IIe computer.
4. You were one of very few in school districts who knew how to load software on a computer.
5. Your access to an embosser meant you had connections!
6. The ability to use an embosser for graphics was a dream few could achieve financially.
7. Literary was taught to you in college and that was about it for braille. Learning Nemeth was baptism by fire.
8. You remember Seedlings as a new company that might actually give your students books…to keep….for free!
9. When scanners and OCR software came out you felt $2000 for a scanner was worth it to help produce braille quicker (and be able to save the file!).
10. Getting your new APH catalog in the mail was an event you looked forward to – there was no such thing as the internet.
11. If you were a traveling TVI, you figured out quickly that a cell phone could save you that hour drive to a student that wasn’t there.
12. Your college professors talked about how they had a choice of who they would work with and usually they only had ‘vanilla blind.’ They were all still adjusting to the idea of TVIs and students with multiple disabilities.
13. You actually had two competing braille software: MegaDots and Duxbury (we know who won).
14. NIMAS was a dream…we all wished publishers would have had the courtesy to do this without force.
15. You know what an Optacon is and probably assisted a student using one.
16. You thought the Braille-N-Speak and Math-N-Speak toys were too cool!

What would you add to the list?

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