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From the
Tulsa World in Okla.
To hear Diane Garrett (pictured) describe how her bright green, sparkling eyes appear even brighter with her deep green shirt, you would never know that the last time she saw the color was when she was 10.
That's when everything went dark.
Garrett, who is blind and hearing impaired, is an operator at the Public Safety Communications Center, where she relies on special equipment that displays the text from her computer screen as Braille she can read along a moving tape and allows her to do the job as well as someone who can see.
But now that the 4-year-old equipment is starting to fail, Garrett was led to TechiePaws, a startup nonprofit organization in Iowa that is helping her get the Braille note-taking device she needs to keep doing the job she loves.
Garrett, 52, started working at the center, which receives 911 calls from the area and assigns the appropriate response, in 2002. She had applied and been interviewed two years earlier.
"It took two years to convince them that the job could be done by a blind person," Garrett said. "It took them two years to just basically say, 'OK. We'll try it.' "
And people around the country were watching. No blind person had ever worked in a city's large 911 call center like Tulsa's before.
With the Braille reader she had at the time, she was able to do the job and quickly found it to be one of the most rewarding she had ever had.
"Because I can't hear and see people the way you and others can, I am afraid to just walk up to somebody on the street," Garrett said. "So this is my way of being able to reach out and help people, even if it is just talking to them for just a few seconds and getting them calmed down enough to take a call."
Garrett was born with an inherited degenerative eye disease that made her severely nearsighted and left her blind in her right eye when she was 6 and her left eye when she was 10. Because she wasn't born blind, she knows colors and objects from her past.
"I remember a lot," she said. "I remember colors. I remember shapes, what the sky looks like, the clouds."
Garrett also has two prosthetic eyes. When she got two new ones, she knew the exact color she wanted and relied on her husband, Daniel Garrett, to get it just right.
Although she relies on others to describe things, she has always felt independent in her adult life, with a guide dog for a little extra help.
After she left a previous job at the Public Service Company of Oklahoma in 1997, she and her husband moved back to her native Georgia to live on her family's land. They lived in a trailer in the middle of a five-acre wooded area. It was the only time in her adult life that she felt trapped and dependent on others.
"I always have access to a bus, a taxi, the lift service or just walking," she said of living in a city. "Living on that property for that one year, I felt so trapped. I felt like somebody had stuck me in a sardine can and I was never going to get loose, and it scared the life out of me."
Now, not only does she feel free, but she also feels like she is giving back to her community for all the help she has received.
When someone relies on equipment such as a Braille note taker to function, when the dots on the display start to stick in the up or down position, it can make a huge difference.
"It needs to be correct at all times," Garrett said.
Jesse Bolinger founded TechiePaws this year to help people like Garrett by providing equipment and helping pay veterinary bills for service dogs.
The organization has started fundraising efforts to help Garrett get what she needs. Her new Braille note taker will be purchased through TechiePaws, at a cost of more than $4,000, and is to be delivered in December.
Bolinger said that because the equipment will also be for personal use, the Americans with Disabilities Act doesn't apply. The law would require the city to provide the equipment if it were used solely for work, but because it will be Garrett's personal Braille note taker, she is responsible for securing the funding.
Bolinger said he is confident that the organization will be able to help Garrett get what she needs so she can keep giving back.
"It's a job that means a lot to me," Garrett said. "That's why I want to stay with the job, and in order to stay with the job, I need the equipment that can help me do it."
