Hello! My name is Michelle, I have a visual impairment. I recently started university in the Netherlands, and have been grappling with the sudden loss of accommodations from my school. In American high school every reading I had to do was accessible, and I always had a teacher I could turn to to read things out loud.

Unfortunately my university does not have these types of options, and requires me to pay for and find my own screen reading software and OCR converter. Luckily I have a laptop that has built in screen reading capabilities, but a lot of texts my university requires me to read are still inaccessible. I use the OCR converter “naturalreaders” but it’s very time consuming to take pictures of each page and upload it. My screen reader also has a hard time reading citation numbers, and often times begins skipping around in the text, or spelling out each word when encountering one.

Due to my disability it already takes me a long time to complete all my course work and I rarely have time to unwind (which is crucial for my bison to recover). I’m very passionate about the study I am doing, and would like to continue with it.

So I was wondering if anyone with more experience could give me some tips or tricks.

Thank you so much!