

My life as a disabled student - kumarski
http://www.theguardian.com/education/mortarboard/2013/oct/03/my-life-as-a-disabled-student

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javindo
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.

~~~
WalterBright
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.

~~~
tehwalrus
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.

~~~
runarb
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.

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ggreer
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.

~~~
arethuza
"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...](http://odi.dwp.gov.uk/disability-statistics-and-
research/disability-facts-and-figures.php#gd)

To me that is a _huge_ proportion of society.

~~~
lmm
Sometimes those counts include e.g. shortsightedness.

~~~
Argorak
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](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myopia#Epidemiology)

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brohoolio
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.

