I had a sit down with all my teachers every year after my injury and it was like 504 or whatever where you how your needs laid out for your disability.

Even after said meetings I still had a large amount of teachers do/say stuff that still makes my blood boil. My least favorite memory is one of my phycology teacher who was antagonizing me relentlessly about respect and then blurted out "You can't wear those glasses to look cool in my class." I literally wore them more than 65% due to existing issues that I'm not going into detail on here.

The audacity teachers have in saying mindless stuff like that. I even had one make multiple comments about how I learned not to stand so close to the experiment, and always pointing me out as an example not to follow in experiments, making an obvious jokes about the injury I lost my eye in, at that school mind you. And I literally was doing the same as the rest of the class, just standing there watching ignorant to the fact that we should've had a lot of safety equipment on to be making dry ice bombs. We literally weren't even provided safety goggles, which ironically is some of the most basic ppe.

On a day to day basis, the issue I have is socializing. It's difficult to start conversations cold when you can't see the face of who you're talking to, so you don't know who it is. And when someone starts talking to you, it's difficult to tell who it is unless they announce who they are or have fairly distinct voice or you know them well. outside of rehab schools where it's all blind people and that's the culture, nobody ever announces who they are since they never have had to do that before. And since I travel with a guide dgo and I can for the most part walk around the classroom without a cane, I don't look blind, so nobody assumes I am, so that makes the daily socialization really hard.
I'm also really frustrated right now with reading textbooks through synthesized voices. I have no other choice so I'm used to it, but sometimes I just get so tired of synthesized voices reading my textbooks.
Aside from the speech synthesizers, I'm also really frustrated with the frequent inaccesibiltity of reading assignments and texts. The reading layout was off in my most recent reading assignment so Voice Dream Reader wasn't reading it in the right order, and in another class, the reading assignments were photocopied pages from a textbook so Voice Dream wasn't picking it up and ClaroReader was absolutely mangling every single word. My last college was frequently unable to help with these same issues, so I would have to have a sighted friend help read things to me. I will need to discuss with my disability center further, but that just feels so hopeless sometimes.
Also when reading from my constitutional law textbook, the citations at the end of each case really disrupt the flow of reading and always throw my focus off. I imagine this will continue to be an issue in further law textbooks and would be even worse for other students in more science based fields.
This turned into a longer rant than I intended, but it's just really frustrating right now.

Yelling at the disability office and getting the accomodations I need is often harder than the coursework itself. It's madness. Doing research papers has turned me off so much from higher education that I can't realistically see myself going beyond undergrad. Props to those who go through with it.

I am a graduate student. My biggest problems are with accessibility of texts, and lack of adaptive resources in my courses. As the blind population is small in general, and even smaller in the specific area of academia, I am frequently the first blind/VI student in the program. Honestly, the academic work is often easier than getting the materials I need to do the work. Moreover, unless I am writing a paper for submission to an academic journal who the hell cares if it's cited properly? A list of references and footnotes should be sufficient for day-to-day coursework. I often read peer written papers on the same topic that are immaculately cited and referenced, but are merely regurgitating information with no demonstration of understanding, synthesis of ideas, or insight. Yet, I lose points. When I hear people complain that academia is broken, I tend to agree. The thing is that it's broken in a different way than most believe it is. /rant

I’m at college now, so my biggest struggle is going to the dinning hall. The menus are in tiny print over the counters and have even tinier signs labeling the trays at the counter. We have a digital menu through our school’s app, but it’s so confusing, and I don’t understand what it’s trying to tell me. So basically I walk into every meal, go up to a counter and ask for something random. Btw, I have food allergies, so it’s a roulette weather or not I’m going to get poisoned.
Otherwise, I go to class as usual, take my seat in the front row, and then go back to my dorm where I do work. All my teachers are very willing to follow my accommodations and help in any way they can, which is a HUGE change from high school where no one gave a shit.

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