What inventions have had the biggest impact on your day-to-day life?
The inventions of my father's and my lifetime have been momentous in a great many fields. Radio, television, airlines, electric appliances, air conditioning, vinyl records, reel-to-reel, cassettes, computers, programming languages, internet, transistors, digital audio, touch tone telephones, fax, telephone answering machines, etc., etc.
Without a doubt, what impacted and helped me a lot was that, while I was losing my eyesight and struggling to see the screen of my computer through a hand-held magnifier, an engineer named Ted Henter who lost his eyesight in a car accident invented a screen-reader called JAWS or Job Access With Speech in 1989 that enabled me to hear the text that was in my DOS computer screen.
Medical advances did not prevent my blindness, in fact, damaged my kidneys instead. Helped by ophthalmologists who tried to help me, notably Dr. Rafael Hernandez, Dr. Mary Lou Lewis and even Dr. Norton, who kept me up-to-date of medical advances and experiments, I not only went to the Bascom-Palmer Eye Institute in Miami during 25 years, but also went to Wilmer Eye Institute of Baltimore and ultimately to The National Eye Institute, part of The National Institute of Health of Bethesda, Maryland.
NIH, through the National Eye Institute had a protocol, when Cyclosporin first came out to avoid rejection of organ transplants and was called Cyclosporin A, to avoid inflammation of the eyes or Uveitis, my eye disease. That medicine was what damaged my kidneys.