Perseverance in Profile
TAMARA RORIE Advocate for Accessibility
BY TOM CALARCO 10
Attorney Tamara Rorie, compliance manager for the Alternative Media Access Center (AMAC) at the Georgia Institute of Technology, was born blind. Though she has no visual perception, her lively imagination and intellect led her to become an authority on assistive technology for the nation’s disabled college students.
excelled in public school and had a strong desire to learn, which motivated her to find ways to assist her learning. Being blind, she paid close attention to details with
her hands. Tis focus enabled her to do things her sighted friends could not. “My friends have always considered me the person to
go to when something was broken or needed fixing or just needed to be figured out,” she says. At her junior high during the early 1970s, the school
always have been inter- ested in technology, and the ways that it would assist me to do jobs bet- ter,” Rorie says. “But my interest goes beyond the visually impaired.” Working for AMAC from the convenience of her home office, she
helps universities around the country provide disabled students with access to text in electronic, audio, and braille formats, as well as specialized assistive technology software. Rorie learned braille at public
school rather than being sent to a school for the blind. Her parents had the option to send her to the alterna- tive school but decided against it. She
DIVERSITY & THE BAR® SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2013
had the first taped-based braille machine that she used, and she says she also was one of the first to use a computer with a speech and screen reader. Te advances in the use of technology to assist the disabled seemed to follow Rorie as she grew up. At the University of North Carolina, where she was an undergraduate, the school had the first synthesizer that scanned books. “It was a huge machine, the size of a table, and it literally
read [books] to you,” she says, “and eventually they were able to store the text. Today, you can use your cell phone to do that.” Tough she set out to become a physical therapist, she
also had an interest in the law and switched her major to political science. She thought her disability would be an obstacle in the job market and that the study of law would give her more versatility and flexibility. “At least with law school,” she says, “I thought I’d have a
skill to get a job, and that was the case.” She worked four years in sales before entering Wake Forest
University School of Law, and during law school she took a job as a special needs client representative with Westlaw
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