When I had major surgery, a lot of my friends and family wanted to remain updated for what was going on during the procedure and the days I spent in the hospital while I didn’t have access to my phone. While a lot of people…

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…

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…

Today (4 January 2021) is World Braille Day, a day that commemorates Louis Braille’s birthday and that celebrates the tactile system for reading and writing that he created that is used by people who are blind or visually impaired from all around the world. While…

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…

A few years ago, one of my best friends called me late at night feeling extremely distressed, because they were trying to figure out if they should report disability accommodation violations. Their professor hadn’t been following the accommodations listed in their Disability Services file, and…

Shortly before my second year of college, I received a few orientation and mobility lessons for learning how to navigate with low vision and a blindness cane. These lessons were helpful for learning general travel skills, but I noticed they didn’t get into specifics about…

Recently, a group of friends and I were talking about places to find free online accessible multiplayer games for people who are blind or that have low vision, and one of my friends recommended RS Games. After browsing through the documentation, my friends and I…

Throughout the year, many friends and relatives enjoy sending greeting cards to celebrate holidays, birthdays, and other major milestones. One of the things that I have trouble explaining to relatives is that I have trouble seeing the lovely cards that they often send to me,…

Viral videos are a common conversation topic in my friend group, but there are times when I’m watching a video and I have no idea why it is funny or popular. Something that helps me a lot is watching videos with audio description, which provides…

I have several friends who are wonderful artists, and one of them is currently working on a drawing that they plan to give to another friend for their birthday. Since this friend has low vision, we’ve been talking a lot about how to create art…

Over the last two years, I have amassed a large amount of friends who are blind or that have low vision. It’s an awesome thing, because we can all relate to various aspects of each other’s lives and learn more about cool accessibility related things…

Since Thanksgiving is coming up, my friends and I have been talking a lot about our favorite foods for the holiday and sharing how we make them. While it’s easy to text each other recipes, I decided to make things a bit more organized and…

Yearbooks are a fun end-of-school-year tradition that allow students to celebrate their accomplishments and friendships that they have made during the year and provide opportunities for documenting memories. My school yearbooks are the only books I own that have a small/standard print size, but I’ve…