Deborah Kendrick
When Robert Carter and his twin sister were born, both were dangerously small, and were placed in infant incubators equipped with a flow of oxygen. Robert's sister lived only a few days. Robert remained in the hospital for a few months until he was finally pronounced sufficiently healthy to travel home in his mother's arms. It would be a little while longer before his family realized that all that oxygen administered to help him thrive had also taken all his eyesight.
"I come from a family of do-ers, not be-ers," Dr. Robert Carter says today of his action-oriented parents. His father, a construction worker, and his mother, a homemaker who raised Robert and his younger sister, believed in the capacity of all people to participate in life, including a son who had this blindness thing about which they were learning.
When it came time for kindergarten, Robert and his mother traveled from their small town of Concord, NC to the state capitol, Raleigh, where they visited a residential school for blind children.
"My mother didn't like it very much," Robert says today, "and I didn't like it at all."
It turned out that a resource program was being launched 30 miles away from Concord, in Charlotte, so the family moved in order to enroll Robert in that program. Each day, he spent an hour or so with a teacher who taught him braille and touch-typing. The rest of his time he spent with his sighted classmates. So committed was his mother to her son's education that it was almost as though he had a second school day after school when he arrived home. Each day, she went over lessons with him, making sure that he was always on the same literal and figurative page as his classmates.
His mother modeled advocacy for him at an early age, dedicating herself each spring and summer to ensuring that his books would be transcribed into braille for the next fall term. He recalls overhearing a phone call when he was very young, during which his mother, discussing the readiness of a book, warned someone at the other end: "If this isn't done by Friday, I'm calling the governor."
When not studying, he was enjoying the same outdoor pleasures as his younger sister: riding bikes, roller skating, sometimes water skiing. He was, in other words, learning to do and not just be.
At the age of 12, he began playing the guitar, aspiring to follow in the musical footsteps of heroes like Kris Kristofferson, John Prine, and Hank Williams. Academics still claimed his greatest attention, though, and before long, he was graduating with a BA in English from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and making plans for graduate school.
Discovering Psychology
While Carter was obtaining a master’s degree in counseling at Western Carolina University, he began working with Upward Bound, a program providing services to minorities. In that particular region, the population served by the program was primarily from the nearby Cherokee reservation. It was during that time that he discovered that his calling was to help people with mental health difficulties and he wanted to be at the top of his credentialed game to continue. He headed for the University of Florida in Gainesville to begin work on a PhD in counseling psychology.
In Gainesville Carter became immersed in braille and audio technology devices and was hired to teach other blind students to use technology in an early program while working on his degree. Apple 2E, 2C, the early VersaBraille, Speech Plus, and other products were soon in the technological tool kit he used daily and taught others, His work ethic has never wavered. One somewhat humorous illustration of that dogged dedication netted him some significant financial assistance during his doctoral program. As he tells it, he applied to Florida’s Department of Educations Division of Blind Services for sponsorship. When assigned a counselor from that program, he explained that he was seeking financial support for tuition, books, etc., to complete the degree that his potential sponsor called “the PH Degree.”
“He asked if I could sign my name,” Robert explains and, in fact, he hadn’t ever acquired that skill. The vocational rehabilitation counselor told him to go home and come back when he could sign his name.
For the next two weeks, Robert’s wife Vicky labored tenaciously with him to learn that pen-in-hand pattern that rarely comes naturally to those who are totally blind. At the end of two weeks, he returned to the vocational rehabilitation office, demonstrated his newfound signature skill, and was granted sponsorship!
In 1989, having added a PhD to his Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees, Carter was ready to find a job. There were three jobs in Texas that interested him, and he was soon hired as a psychologist to work with students at Texas A&M University in College Station, TX. Thirty years later, he is still there, identified today as a psychologist 4 (the highest designation) and still loves his work.
Texas A&M’s Counseling and Psychological Services (CAPS) serves some 68,000 students. Carter typically sees five to six students daily, leads workshops, and provides leadership to interns who come for their final year before becoming certified psychologists themselves. In addition to a demanding full-time professional career, he has maintained a strong hold on other passions as well.
Tech Doctor Podcast
Since the mid 1980s, Carter has loved braille and audio technology, incorporating it into his work and personal activities. He wrote for TACTIC (the forerunner to AccessWorld in the 1990s, and has participated in a variety of email listservs and beta test groups. In 2010, he launched The Tech Doctor podcast, a popular podcast in which he looks at braille and audio products and interviews players in the access technology arena. With some 3,000 subscribers, the podcast continues to grow, appearing whenever The Tech Doctor feels some topic or individual warrants attention.
Preferred Access Technology
Carter's current technology toolbox includes an iPhone, MacBook Pro, Apple Watch, Air Pods Pro, Braille Sense Polaris, Apple TV, and three low-cost braille displays (Braille Me, Orbit 20, and Brailliant 14) that he purchased last year in order to do a comparison evaluation on his Tech Doctor podcast. Although he does not use technology when counseling (employing the innate human skills of listening, responding, and understanding) he accesses the department’s scheduling and storage system constantly for entering notes and scheduling students. The system, he says, was built specifically for the CAPS staff and is completely accessible. Not always so easily accessed are the batches of intern applications he needs to review each year, but Carter is long accustomed to solving problems and finding workarounds. “If something takes longer to do as a blind person, so be it," he says.
Music and Perseverance
Robert’s 50-year commitment to playing guitar is one more example of his unflagging determination. In his early musical explorations, he played guitar to accompany his own singing. About six years ago, he decided to advance his skills and work on becoming an instrumentalist. Since that time, he has practiced daily, for an hour before work (at 4am) and an hour in the evening. He says the hard work is definitely netting results.
In addition to work and music and technology, Robert and his wife make frequent trips to New York to visit their adult son, Graham, a filmmaker who recently featured his parents in a project—his mom tending bar, his dad playing guitar. Graham is, in Robert Carter’s words, "our finest accomplishment.”
That touching remark is typical of this man who defines himself as an existential humanist, whose eclectic interests embrace music, technology, and politics, and who does not hesitate to express gratitude.
Robert Carter's Essential Skills and Tools for Success
Asked about the tools he thinks most supported his success, Carter mentions braille and audio technology, but only after enumerating some less tangible and critical character traits.
“I learned early to advocate for myself,” he explains. “And I’ve never been afraid to go the extra mile.”
When the University of Florida was skeptical about a blind person’s ability to complete the PhD program, he attended provisionally for one semester, agreeing to continue only if the first semester was successful. The summer before beginning his PhD, he pored over writing manuals, teaching himself to be a clearer, stronger writer, after self-identifying that as an academic area requiring attention.
Finally, he says simply, “You don’t do these things by yourself.” Bringing home the point, he expresses profound gratitude to his family, his teachers, his colleagues.
It’s not difficult to imagine how this soft-spoken, perceptive individual has guided countless students to healing from trauma, abuse, anxiety and more with his training and skills work that has nothing to do with eyesight, but everything to do with insight.
This article is made possible in part by generous funding from the James H. and Alice Teubert Charitable Trust, Huntington, West Virginia.
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- A Profile of Dr. Daniel Zingaro, Assistant Professor, University of Toronto by Deborah Kendrick
- An Interview with Michael Hingson, CEO of the Do More Foundation by Deborah Kendrick
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