Disability and Chronic Illness

If you or a loved one has just been diagnosed with low vision or blindness, here’s why you need a case with your state vision impairment department

My biggest IEP goal, learning to self advocate, and how it has helped me more than I ever imagined

My life with double vision and seeing the world with four eyes open

At many of the recent events I have attended, I’ve noticed that the speakers have been including visual descriptions of themselves when introducing themselves, to be more inclusive of visually impaired audiences. I have really enjoyed listening to these visual descriptions and find them helpful,…

When I talk about how assistive technology has the power to change a life, this is what I want Congress Members to know about assistive technology and accessibility

Last year, one of my best friends, who I will call Jane, experienced a great deal of academic ableism from a professor in their major. While I wasn’t there to witness what happened in the classroom, I watched Jane suffer from a mental and emotional…

Even though I have lived with a chronic pain condition for many years, it wasn’t until recently that I fully realized how my condition influences how I interact with websites, applications, and other digital content, and how there aren’t many resources available that talk about…

One of the things that I love about my college is that there are hundreds of classes available for students to take that cover a wide variety of topics and areas of interest. While there are certain classes that a student may need to take…

Almost five years ago, I was sitting in my dorm room at George Mason University, bored out of my mind and trying to figure out what to do for the weekend. My homework for my assistive technology class was finished at this point, and I…

Over the weekend, one of my friends sent me a video recorded by an active bystander for academic ableism who was showing a situation where a student with hearing loss was being berated by the professor for their disability. I don’t want to share the…

A little over a year ago, I was diagnosed with Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome following a fall on campus and subsequent hospitalization. I’ve learned a lot about how to manage this condition over the course of a year, and my professors have been very supportive…

In 2019, my time living on campus came to a very sudden and unexpected close after I was diagnosed with a medical condition that made it impossible for me to continue living on my own. While this medical condition is now much better controlled and…

Even though I was diagnosed with low vision around the age of three, I didn’t realize until I was in middle school that blindness  and vision loss was a spectrum and not a binary- up until that point, I figured that anyone who used a…

I recently came across a conversation thread on social media talking about how difficult it can be to keep a dorm room clean with chronic illness and how having a messy dorm can be frustrating not only for visitors, but for the person living in…

Recently, I had the opportunity to give a talk at the Inclusive Design 24 Conference (ID24) called “Why Everyone Should Design For Chiari Malformation,” in honor of Chiari Malformation Awareness Month. This talk was especially meaningful for me, as I ended up giving it the…