Fw: Cynthia Ice - Obituary

Cynthia Lynn Ice, 49, of Maynard Massachusetts died unexpectedly on 
Wednesday, May 14, 2008 at home. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, she was the 
daughter of Inez L Busch, MD of Fairhaven Massachusetts and the late 
John F. Ice, MD of Louisville, Kentucky. Including her mother, she is 
survived by her sisters, Shelley A. Ice of Fairhaven, Massachusetts and 
Amy C. Ice, MD of Goshen, New York and her brother Kevin F. Ice of Rock 
Hill, South Carolina, his wife Denise and their three children, 
Jonathan, Allison and Carolyn Ice, and several aunts, uncles and 
cousins. A graduate of Blue Hill Academy in Blue Hill, Maine, and Sarah 
Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York , she was employed at IBM in 
Westford, Massachusetts as a software engineer.

She began her career as the Assistant Dean of Housing and Student 
Activities at Sarah Lawrence College. Diabetic from the age of 7, she 
was blinded due to diabetic retinopathy in her twenties while in 
graduate school for engineering at Brown University in Providence, Rhode 
Island. She taught herself to use the computer with the aid of then 
rudimentary screen reading software. She worked at Lotus Development 
Corporation in customer support and later at Iris Associates helping to 
make Notes R5 accessible to the blind and disabled. At the time of her 
death, she was the Accessibility Focal Point across the IBM/Lotus Brand.

Because of the many challenges she faced in her life and career due to 
inaccessible computer software, she felt her mission and talent lay with 
making software accessible to the disabled in order to help people like 
herself become employable and able to engage with the world. She was a 
loyal IBM employee and took her direction from a quote by the founder of 
IBM, Thomas J. Watson: “Follow the path of the unsafe, independent 
thinker. Expose your ideas to the dangers of controversy. Speak your 
mind and fear less the label of ‘crackpot’ than the stigma of 
conformity. And on issues that seem important to you, stand up and be 
counted at any cost.”

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------