Vinnie & Meagan’s Assistive Technology Story: Learning and Teaching Together

After thirty-one years as a New York City schoolteacher, Meagan was used to being the one having all the answers. For decades, students and colleagues who attended her fifth-grade class turned to her with the same question: “Ms. Gassney, can you show me how this works?” Computers had always been her thing. So when she lost her vision later in life, the screens that had once helped her solve so many problems suddenly felt out of reach. 

When Meagan first walked into Lighthouse Guild to talk through her goals, her request was straight-forward: “I just want to learn technology.” 

She received a call while she was doing her laundry. “Meagan, we’ve got an open spot with your name on it!” said Eddy Perez, manager of Lighthouse Guild’s Tech Pals program. Her first mentor, Kevin — one of several young Tech Pals mentors who are also blind or have low vision — walked her through the basics of using VoiceOver on her iPhone. “I finally understood all of the finger swiping, I could actually answer calls now!” 

Then she was paired with Vinnie. 

Vinnie, a nineteen-year-old music education major at the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, is blind herself. She spent years learning sheet music in braille and mastering the finger-swipes of VoiceOver, so she understood Meagan’s world firsthand. When she heard she could mentor an older adult with vision loss through Tech Pals, she signed up right away, then spent weeks training: learning how to coach and explain tech that had, over the years, become second nature to her, but is foreign to someone new to it. She quickly understood that knowing how to use technology and teaching it were two very different skillsets, and that the trick was keeping things simple. 

Vinnie’s and Meagan’s weekly sessions became a steady back-and-forth. Meagan showed up with a list — email, the web, and, after Vinnie’s nudging, a keyboard. She finally bought one, and it changed everything: her devices could listen as well as talk. 

The real turning point was perhaps a surprising one for someone who’d been a teacher for over thirty years. “You’re not going to remember this if you don’t take notes,” Vinnie told her. Meagan was getting a taste of her own advice. But she took it. “Even now, Vinnie’s words just pop into my head: take notes.” 

Between lessons, the roles reversed. Vinnie talked about her uncertainty over her future, and Meagan got to dispense advice again — sharing what she called “tricks of the trade only a teacher would know.” Listening to her, Vinnie started to see her own path more clearly. The traditional route of a music education degree wasn’t, after all, what she wanted; she actually learned to love the one-on-one, adaptive teaching she’d found with Meagan. Vinnie has since changed her major. She’s still pursuing piano, but she’s also working toward certification as an assistive technology trainer. 

Vinnie’s time in Tech Pals ended with her graduation. Vinnie may be looking for a new avenue to continue helping others, but her mindset has remained the same since her first day on the job, “Students just need a way to learn. There’s no one way to teach or learn something.” 

Meagan isn’t yet done — she’s already looking forward to meeting the next mentor to come through the program, and we all know she’ll be taking notes the whole time!