My life as a disabled student | Hacker News Reader

My life as a disabled student

theguardian.com

48 pointskumarski24 comments

Whilst my disability isn't as impacting as hers, I thought I'd contribute my own perspective on going through a similar process.

I have very poor vision as a result of occular albinism and because it's retinal it can't be corrected with glasses. This leads to endless frustration and ultimately finding creative solutions to many problems faced at university.

The fact of the matter is there simply isn't support to do things "normally" with a disability, whatever it may be. People make adjustments but it's never quite right. As a computer science student, you might think this could be mitigated because a lot of my work involves using a computer and for the most part this is correct. I have good enough vision that I can tell, however, if a monitor is at a poorly configured resolution so I always prefer to have maximum resolution with zooming tools.

This is going completely off topic but it is one of the reasons I still tend to use Windows a lot instead of a linux distro; they simply don't support ease of access as well. Windows recently introduced a "Win + +/-" zoom tool in Win7 which has honestly been life changing. On the contrary, trying to work out how to increase the font size in SWI-Prolog on a school machine was a fruitless endeavour.

So what's my point? With a disability, there is no escaping it. You have to adapt and not rely on support because frankly it's just too much hassle. I can't read lecturers writing on boards in lectures so I borrow notes from friends, it's not ideal but I don't think it's worth the headache of pissing about with a ridiculously slow and difficult to use camera system provided by a disability support grant. I'm not sure what the solution is for my particular problems but I resonate the sentiments of the article; if you're disabled at university, you're going to have a hard time no matter what support they try to offer.

Hey, awesome! I have vision impairment as a result of albinism too! (nystagmus; my corrected acuity is about 20/100 and 20/120-150 without glasses) Fellow red/blonde-haired pasty-white person unite~~!

For those running Linux, it's easy to change the font size of GTK+ and QT programs, which affect on all major apps on the system. That combined with browsers' zoomability makes it possible to get by... though yes, I do have to concede, it doesn't top Windows' magnifying glass. Maybe a nice Wayland WM will get there some day. We'll have to wait and see.

In the mean time, it is amusing to be working in the lab and have my coworkers be able to read the screen from halfway across the room...

For those of you who are curious, this is the font size that I'm comfortable at: http://i.imgur.com/O7tTskY.png

Agree with all your points. It's ironic that most of the coping/adjusting I do happens away from the computer. E.g. because I don't drive, I have to live in a city with reasonable public transport and have to depend on friends for shopping trips, etc. Maybe that's one reason why I like my job as a CS grad student: because I can adjust for my weaknesses to play to my strengths.

Wow it seems we have incredibly similar situations! Here's my current zoom level on HN, sitting upright with my face about 2 feet (rough guess, maybe half a meter?) on a 27" monitor http://i.imgur.com/oCU01L9.png

(Ignore all the noob tabs, I'm currently making a lesson plan to teach children PHP!)

I'll definitely give linux another try, although I'll still have to keep my Windows install for gaming at home, my laptop could benefit from a nice distro.

I also find it funny how people can read my screen from the other side of the room. Somewhat unrelated but funny anecdote is my friends staring in awe at my ability to use Visual Studio on a 14" ultrabook display - huge font size and lots of nice whitespace = not very many columns. A friend noted "your brain must have a huge code buffer"!

I do agree though that of all possible career options, there are far more which could be hindered greatly than development.

Edit: As a side note, I think the last figure I can remember for my vision was 6/36 - although that was years ago. I don't really bother with glasses now because the correction apparently just helps to "not tire my eyes so much from the nystagmus" - not an acuity correction unfortunately.

> "your brain must have a huge code buffer!"

Yeah, that's a great way of describing it. It's hard to code well and keep all that context in your head when you can only fit 21 lines on the screen... At least people still often stick with 80-character lines; it's awful when they spill over and begin to wrap.

Using Compiz (I think) I can use Win+scrollwheel to zoom in the entire screen. I can then pan around the screen with the mouse. Hope that's useful to you :-)

My brother and I both have the same thing. Like you, I don't really ask for accomodations because I find it not worth the trouble; I just come up with my own solutions. The only real pain in the ass is not being able to drive. I use public transportation all the time but kinda hate it. Nothing worse after a long day than a sweaty, over-crowded bus. Also really narrows the options when apartment-hunting.

But all in all it's not the worst thing one could have by a long shot. Most days I don't even think about it.

Actually, school was a lot worse than work. I've never had any problems that I can recall at a job, I just make it clear that I don't drive to meet clients or whatever. No big loss there.

I'm curious - why not get a video projector and throw the image on a wall? I understand this is not a portable solution, but for at-home, this might be just the ticket.

My eyes aren't quite that bad (no albinism, just crappy eyes--worse than 20/40 corrected), but, having tried a projector, it wasn't until I was out of school and had an apartment of my own--no roommates--that I had enough space to make it big enough to be more clear than monitors given the bigger distance between my eyes and the monitors, and now that I have the room I already have the monitors so it's not really useful. I have to think it'd get worse with worse eyesight.

Echoing what itsboring said; it's hard to describe but sometimes we just have to... be closer. For example, I can sometimes read incredibly small writing if I can just get it right up to my eyes and really squint but I physically can't read a number plate more than a few meters away no matter how much I squint even if, relatively, the size in my vision is the same if not bigger.

The problem with huge displays is that the ratio doesn't work out in our favor. Great for movies, not for text. It's counter-intuitive, but with low vision, you still have to sit close enough that a wall-sized display is a ticket to neck problems.

I actually prefer monitors on the smaller side so I don't have to move my head so much.

projectors are very very expensive; £2,000-ish per year for a bulb, if you have them on continuously like a monitor. You also need (as mentioned by sibling comment) a big, dark room to make the image bigger & better than a monitor.

Laser video projectors are dropping fast in price now. Some vendors claims at least Laser video projector a lamp lifetime of 20 000 hours, 4X longer than a conventional mercury lamp projectors.

Stepping back a bit: The main problem here is that disabilities are rare, and each disability requires different accommodations. Having the staff and equipment to accommodate every disability would be prohibitively expensive, so most organizations just play it by ear. That forces each disabled person to fight for their accommodations; a frustrating and often embarrassing experience.

This problem will only get worse. As genetic screening and medical technologies improve, disabilities are going to become rarer. At some point, certain disabilities will become so rare that it will be socially and politically acceptable to stop accommodating them.

On the bright side, medical advances will mean fewer disabled people. Eventually, the wheelchair will go the way of the iron lung.

"The main problem here is that disabilities are rare"

I was curious about this (I have two disabled siblings, so I assumed that I would over estimate the frequency) - according to the Department of Work and Pensions:

"Around 6 per cent of children are disabled, compared to 16 per cent of working age adults* and 45 per cent of adults over State Pension* age in Great Britain."

http://odi.dwp.gov.uk/disability-statistics-and-research/dis...

To me that is a huge proportion of society.

Sometimes those counts include e.g. shortsightedness.

Although shortsightedness is easily corrected nowadays, it should still be counted as a disability from a certain degree on.

Considering the numbers here, I would not expect the parents numbers to include all cases, though:

"A recent study involving first-year undergraduate students in the United Kingdom found 50% of British whites and 53.4% of British Asians were myopic.[62]"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myopia#Epidemiology

Each individual disability is rare and people have different needs. A solution for one disability won't work for every disability.

And so, catering for disability in general is a challenging (but worthwhile) problem.

Medical advances have - up to now - probably meant more disabled people, and I expect this will continue.

As people reach old age, disability rates increase. Medical advances allow people to live full, healthy lives with their disabilities when they may not have survived childhood in the past.

In any case, disability is not going away.

Social advances too - where once people with disabilities would have been ghettoed away now they're helped to live independent lives.

I have a different stance, and believe disabilities will skyrocket due to advancements in healthcare and availability of medical devices: People can stay alive longer, but be bound to say a wheelchair or mobility scooter, thereby requiring disability accommodation.

"Wheelchair bound" is discouraged nowadays, as it implies that the wheelchair is something negative. The opposite is the case: the wheelchair enables the user to freely move around, enabling his personal freedom.

In old days, to be around people who accepted them, LGBT people had to move to clusters in big cities: acceptance of LGBT in 1950's were quite uncommon.

Uncommon/expensive physical accommodations will require acceptance of people having to move into clusters.

When disabilities become rarer, it will require a general acceptance of disabled people having to move into clusters and that it's not a human rights denial that accommodations are only provided in certain areas.

I don't think disability is that rare. In the US disabled people are believed to be at least 30 million people. Why not have people trained and move them around? Why not have advocates within the university who do the fighting?

Just another example of the importance that those who are developing software and platforms of the future to develop them in a way to make them accessible to all.

Microsoft and Google I'm looking at you and what you are doing in the educational space.

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