During my in-person tech internship and while working in other remote positions that require me to sit at my desk a lot, I have experimented a lot with creating accessible workspaces for Chiari Malformation that make it easier for individuals to do computer work and…

Balancing security and accessibility, an IT major’s guide to improving your passwords

As part of an extra credit unit on internet safety, I presented a lesson on how to recognize phishing attempts with visual impairments, inclusive of blind and low vision. Phishing is defined as “the fraudulent attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords and…

Since I first stepped into my kindergarten classroom, I have used some form of assistive technology for dysgraphia every day of my life and in every single one of my classes and jobs, from K-12 to college to graduate school. Even though my handwriting has…

When I interned for a major technology company in 2019, one of the most important “soft” skills I had to learn in my first few weeks was how to navigate my internship building and hallways independently with low vision. Like most corporate buildings, this building…

As a student with low vision who uses a blindness cane/white cane to navigate unfamiliar environments, I find it helpful to use either a human guide or a visual interpreter when I travel to conferences, walk around exhibit halls, or attend fairs and smaller events…

When I attend professional conferences for assistive technology and computing, I often find myself overwhelmed trying to “do it all” by attending all of the sessions for a given day, trying to run around the exhibit hall to meet everyone, and attending networking and post-conference…

Using applications and settings to reduce eyestrain from blue light.

When one of my friends noticed they had trouble seeing their desktop icons, they asked me if there was a way to create custom keyboard shortcuts in Windows so that they could access application features and programs more efficiently. My friend liked the idea of…

When I interned at Microsoft as a program management intern in 2019, one of the first questions my mentor had for me was how I wanted to set up my tech internship desk as a PM intern with low vision and photophobia. At first, I…

When I think about high school and college classes that prepared me for a Microsoft PM internship, a lot of different classes come to mind outside of the requirements for my major. A program management intern should have a broad understanding of various topics related…

In 2019, I interned at Microsoft on the Excel team, where I helped outline the redesign of a feature that makes it easier for users to locate patterns in a given dataset. Someone had asked me about what I bring to work as a program…