Blindness

A school for the blind sorted kids into teams by cognitive ability. Team 5 was college-track. Team 6 was group home track. I was Team 5. When I asked for Team 6, they said no.

A lifetime of being talked down to, left out, and left behind by people who assumed I couldn’t rather than asking what I needed. This is what infantilization looks like from the inside, and what it costs the people it happens to.

The privacy community pushes self-hosting, de-Googling, and more private alternatives as universal goods. But for disabled users with multiple conditions, those solutions often cost more, work less, and break when we need them most. Privacy shouldn’t require giving up the tools that keep us functioning.

I built a screen-reader-first kingdom builder because I can’t play the games the audiogame community keeps making. The alpha is live, the feedback is coming in, and it works.

My family built a vocabulary for what it’s actually like to live in my body. Systems have their own vocabulary, and none of it has room for mucus-y days, whooshy nights, or the dog who saw the version of me that was actually there.

Multiple disabilities don’t add up to twice the difficulty. They compound. And the hidden cost of producing “acceptable” output from a system with no reserve capacity is one that no assessment, no checklist, and no institution has ever known how to count.

I’m grieving the realization that the independent future people imagined for me wasn’t based on my actual support needs. It was based on what they could see, what they wanted to believe, and what systems are willing to recognize.

The common assumption is that multiple disabilities are additive: two disabilities means twice the difficulty. This is wrong. Disabilities compound multiplicatively, and accessibility design that ignores this causes active harm.

A personal account of my experiences as a blind, multiply disabled student in a residential school setting, highlighting systemic failures and their long-term impact on health, functioning, and safety.

An in-depth essay exploring the challenges faced by multiply disabled learners in traditional education settings, and how self-paced education provides a more accessible and flexible alternative.