Episode Notes

In this episode we discuss various challenges faced by those with a vision impairment when they consider studying beyond school.

Transcription: Greetings. You're listening to Kerry's Chaos, a podcast about the random happenings in my life and things that I find interesting. If you have any comments, questions, or feedback, you can find me at @khoath on Twitter or email me at [email protected]. Thanks for listening and I hope you enjoy the podcast.

So, welcome to Kerry's Chaos episode. Something I'll let it the number in later. We're talking about school challenges. I am welcoming Mariah and Jessica back to the podcast. This one's going to be a rough one, guys. And we're talking about educational challenges. In what instances have you been people don't like the word handicapped by things that have happened in your educational experience. And I would argue that as people with a disability, we are often hampered by the systems that are designed to help us. And I will start with a very quick story about when I went to university in 1995 and they wanted me to go and see the Equity people to get accommodations. But this was 1995, so I had to go see them. So bringing them up wasn't an option. Emailing them wasn't an option. I had to go see them and I had to get to the library. And I said, so where's the library? How does one get there from the bus station? And they're like, well, if you just look towards the center of campus, it's a really big building, you'll find it. There's one small problem. I said, I'm totally blind. I can't actually look towards the center of the building. And they said, well, we have no idea how to help you. We've never had anyone as blind as you hear before.

Wow

Yeah. Luckily I got a pretty thick skin, so I just had a chuckle and went, well, that's pretty funny. But I wouldn't be necessarily saying that as an Equity officer.

Yeah..

Oh my..!

Yeah. And I think probably the one thing I learned and this sort of dovetails into something else that I'm sure we both of you can get onto to a degree. When you're doing study, the buck stops with you. It's on you to get things done, it's on you to get the things achieved, and it's on you to get the things to happen in a timely manner.

Especially if you're college. As far as accommodation things go, at least here in the States, in elementary, middle and high school, you've kind of got a system. You have people that make the accommodation wheels turn. You're just like, I need this. And they're like, okay, or it's supposed to be I need this and okay, depending on where you're at. But in college, you have to go and sit down with somebody and write out the whole, I need this, this, and then you take all these for me. I took accommodation sheets to each of my professors and I had to talk with the professors and make sure that they were okay with giving me the accommodations, and I didn't always get what I needed because it's not guaranteed that you're going to get all of the things that you've mentioned.

Before we even get into that. Would you argue, or would both of you argue? Because I certainly feel that that's a lot more work for us to do than the average student to actually get these accommodations. You've got to basically run around. You've got to network with these individuals to get your accommodations, to get the things that you need to complete the course that other students don't have to fight for.

Right. And it's even more basic than that. It's even as basic as you have to get more work. You have to do more work to actually get a version even of the textbook that we all use or that your entire class would use for you. And that becomes an interesting thing altogether.

I had an interesting situation. I was exceedingly lucky, and when I did my we have TAFE over here, which is technical and further education. It's our sort of apprentice, sort of industrial collegey thing. And I did a computer course there, and one of the things that I had that nobody else tended to have was I actually had a good friend who would scan and type my books for me. So he would basically scan them, run them through Omni page, tidy them up. Now, interestingly enough, when we actually looked at how much it would cost to have this done through an organization, they were charging $126 an hour for the work to scan. But it meant I got really high quality electronic copies of my books, which is something that you can struggle to do, because you got to find out whether a book is available on coursemart. You've got to find out whether it's on bookshare or whether it's on reading Ally, or whether it's somewhere else that you didn't even think of, and that's a lot of research and running around for you. So time management would be critical, I'd be thinking.

Yeah, also, if you get a professor that's not receptive, because it's true what they say. They say in colleges that some professors don't give a damn about you, Its true. Some do not care. And I've seen that. I've gone through that. And it's a real struggle when you're trying to be as open as you can and be as understanding as you can, as honest as you can about what you need. And when they just refuse to even acknowledge.

I think it's a lot of people talk about mental health, and they talk about mental wellness, and they talk about general well being, and they talk about levels of anxiety and stuff like that. And one of the things that I will say, and I'm not picking on anybody, particularly in this podcast when I say this, I'm making it as a general statement, but if the cap fits, feel free to wear it. I see a lot of vision impaired people who come out of further education quite shaken up, quite damaged, with quite a lot of damage done to their confidence.

I'll take that, okay, alright, Guilty. Guilty!

Yeah. And I think one of the things that a lot of people don't realize is that you go through these systems and you're looking at the accommodations and you're doing all this negotiation, some quite advanced negotiation and some quite advanced networking that honestly able bodied people aren't that good at, at that age. But you're expected to pull this all off. And a lot of this can have a big impact on your mental health and mental well being. And it can be demoralizing to have these obstacles put up in front of you, especially when situations don't work out and you are unable to get what you want. There is no way to get from A to B, regardless of how hard you tried. And a lot of this can have a big impact on your mental health and mental well being. And it can be demoralizing to have these obstacles put up in front of you, especially when situations don't work out and you are unable to get what you want. There is no way to get from A to B, regardless of how hard you tried.

Yeah. It really is on you to make the thing.

Yeah, it's on you.

Yeah. I've seen people and they start off happy, excited, committed, dedicated, and they really want to study, insert whatever course it is, and they're absolutely they're there for that, as Mariah says, and they are dashed to pieces on the rocks of ignorance and whatever else by the system that is meant to serve them, that is meant to assist them. And I think the other thing that is problematic with the system is the round trip time it takes for material to be presented. Like, you put a request in and it could be two months before you get the material, and once two months has gone by, your course could have finished. And I think, Mariah, you were saying you've actually been unable to complete courses not because you didn't want to do them or you were too busy partying, but because the material didn't turn up on time.

That's actually very true. I've had cases where I've been told that I was going to have a tutor in a class and the tutor just didn't show up, and I had to retake the class my final semester. It was actually a contemporary math class. I had to retake that class my final semester of college. I have had to drop classes because the coursework was in an inaccessible format and the professor wasn't willing to change that. I had a dual credit class in high school where I got every single bit, of coursework, the day before the teacher was supposed to put in final grades.

And this assumes that we've got the deck stacked against us, just as a case in point. And we've got a system that we're also struggling against. And this, of course, assumes that you as the student, are behaving perfectly and doing all of the things that you're supposed to. Now, I don't know about you, but I've certainly had times when I've put assignments off until the last minute. Yes, procrastinate now, I think they call it, and it'll be okay. t's 20 minutes until it's due or insert time window before it's due and the technology fails. And of course, it's all the technology's fault, isn't it?

Yes. I'm sorry, my computer crashed.

That's it. The dog.

This is a classic one. And the cool thing about this one is this isn't just blind people that do this. I don't know how many sighted people this has happened to, but I am so glad that I am not alone. You write a research paper and your pages and pages into your research paper, and you forget to save your work in Word, and then Word crashes.

So we've got situations. Well, and the other one is one copy of your assignment paper. Now, let me be real. We just had a podcast about backups and data reliability. You should have that scattered across, like, seven thumb drives, and three of them should-

And then two of them should be on your keys. One should be in your backpack, and the other one should be in your Jeans pocket. You just get so caught up in wrighting. At least I did until, well, this happened. You get so freaking caught up in writing, and you just write and write and write, and you don't save and your word just crashes.

Like a pro tip for people, a pro tip for people in modern computer programs, depending on what you're using, make sure your autosave is enabled.

Oh, yeah, correct.

Also, in some word processing packages, and perhaps Jessica will disagree with this, but they're only word processor files, so they're not that big. There's an option to keep, like, four or five backups in a rotation thing, so you can turn that on if you've got the disk space, just to be sure, so that if the latest copy scrambles, you can go back and get the one that you had from a couple of hours ago.

What word? The new word, I think, as of, like, 2010, maybe, I think actually does have now, it doesn't always work, though, so please don't rely on it. But a lot of times if your Word crashes, you have, like, this temp file that says dollar and then the document. Yes, and you can sometimes recover it from that. It's about a 75%

Don't rely on this. You think that's bad? Braille note users when Keysoft would lock up in keyword and you'd be stuck. You'd have like this like this has happened. I've been writing, and I've had pages and pages and pages and pages of stuff, and it froze on me. And they tell you in the user's manual, if you have to reset your Braille note while you're in your word processor, shit's going to go away. What else can you do?

And this is one thing. This is an absolute law as far as Braille note takers. And I don't know whether I really…

Well, I think I will, actually. Don't store data in the memory of your Braille note taker that you care about. Put it on a card. Put it on put it on a flash drive. Yeah, because you can't do not rely on the Ram disc the backed Ram disc or the flash memory of your note taker. Also, if something is that important, put it on two cards, not one, because you don't want one of the cards to go through the wash. You don't want the cards to get lost. And let's face it, if you've got one of those micro SD cards with a converter and it falls out of the out of the converter yeah. You are.

This wasn't even like it was like new document. You're writing, you're writing, you're writing, you're writing. And the Braille display would just freaking freeze. It would just lock. You have no other choice but to reset the damn thing. And when you do, you open the document and it's blank. You're like, no.

And I think this is something that we get to contend with. I mean, yes, regular people have unstable computers and unstable technology, but it's nowhere near the level of instability that we deal with.

So true. I am so glad, in all honesty, that more and more mainstream computer programs and things are kind of becoming in terms of, like, word processors and all that, are becoming more usable for us because there was a time when we had to rely on our note takers to write from work. They were not so awesome. I'm not going to say that I'd love to go back to college, but if I had to go back to college, the time of now is a great time for a blind person, as far as technology is concerned, to go to school, to college. Now, accommodations, as you guys have said before, that's a totally different.

And it's interesting because years and years ago I don't know whether my mic is going to pick this up. Let's find out if it will. Years and years ago, we used to have to use a scanner. Yes. Put the book on the scanner yourself as a student. Get your Mate and six bricks to hold down the book. So it was flat. No, but hold it flat against the glass and scan flip page, scan, quirzvile, even open book. Or if you didn't have the money and you're on a budget, it was Abbey Fine Reader and Microsoft Word, because you could acquire to Word in Abbey Fine Reader, and that was only like $200. That was the cheap one

There was that really cool one too, though. It's expensive. What was it?

Was it Sarah?

I think it was Sarah, the one.

That had the keypad.

It was a physical machine.

That was the reading edge. There was also the Reading Edge, that machine with the keypad.

Well, Sarah was the sarah had one, too. Sarah was like, that thing was so cool.

So just to tell you a ghetto story, because this podcast is about reminiscing to a certain extent as well, when I was 1990, 919, 98, I didn't have a lot of money. I was pretty broke. So what I actually used to do is I had this scanner that I'd bought from Harvey Norman's, which is one of our electrical stores. And I'd actually scan all of the pages into TIFF files and then feed them through the bundled optical character recognition stuff that came with the scanner in batch mode. So I'd literally run these files through this program and get them to OCR, recognize them. And that was the budget way that I could actually get text off pages.

So, speaking of OCR, not necessarily OCR related, but similar.

Yeah.

Kerry, did you ever use an opticon?

Actually, we think it might be broken, but the bloke next door still has one.

Oh, my God. That's awesome.

They're fascinating.

They are.

If you don't know what an opticon is, guys. It literally lets you scans like a picture, but you can feel the picture under your fingers as it kind of.

It'S got this little window with all these pins in it, and it makes this annoying buzzing noise, like a demented wasp.

And interestingly enough, the camera was connected to the thing by optical fiber, and that was one of the things that was most likely to break over time, was the camera connection between the opticon and the main unit, the actual camera. But it was one of those devices that we really haven't seen the like of lately. But for the people who knew how to use it, there were people who could read monitors with it.

you could literally feel what you read as if you were reading Braille, but you're reading prints. You would feel it all in your finger. You would feel if someone was like if someone scanned, like, a picture of something for you as well, you could feel the picture under your fingers. It was an amazing piece of technology for its time.

I want to see one for me, because I'm generally curious and because it's a demented wasp

Yeah, this was this whining sort of noise. I'd have to find one on YouTube. But it was kind of a really bizarre noise because the pins would vibrate. They'd vibrate at quite a high frequency, but I don't know how they were driven or whatever. I mean, somebody could tell us about that, but it was interesting. And it's interesting to see how technology has evolved. It's interesting to see how so much more material has become electronically available. Does anyone remember the bad old days of running the PDFs through the Kezzi virtual printer? Because that was the only way to get the stuff out of them.

Oh, my God.

Yeah. And you'd sit there with your machine, and if you were clever, you'd set the preferences in Quirt file to make noises for the events. So it would basically glump its way through your book. And once it had made sort of 300 Glump noises, you'd realize that it had recognized all the pages.

Yeah. All right, cool. We're good It's funny because all of this is stuff that we either have had to do or, if you're like, you're having to find ways of getting the information you need. One of the biggest culture shocks for me, when I was in middle school, I went to the School for the Blind in Texas, and they had me there. And then I was mainstreamed into Lamar Middle School, and I didn't have to. They had everything at TSB models. My papers were brailled. They would have transcribers. It was all and everything was there, and it was great. And, oh, you need a model of a cell for your science class. Here you go. Oh, you need this for your social studies. Okay. One of the biggest things for me was coming back and not having that and not having those resources available. And part of me kind of wishes I never experienced that, because what that does is it makes you lax.

I think it does to a point. But one of the things I will say is when you have the things available, it certainly makes education a lot easier.

Oh, yeah, no doubt.

Towards the end of my Academy career, and I used to get a bit jaded, and I'd sort of joke with the students. And one of the biggest questions we'd get for the Academy and I think Jessica would have got this question as well when she did interviews and stuff, because she worked with me at the Academy for a number of years. Is it accessible? And I'm like, oh, hell no. It's completely inaccessible. Where the Cisco Academy for the vision impaired? And it's completely inaccessible.

How often did you guys get that question? How often was that?

A lot more often than you think.

Yeah, I was going to say, yeah.

I would sort of joke about, oh, no, we can't be bothered with that. I mean, we're basically this organization that teaches blind people all over the world. But no, we've decided to give accessibility a miss. And they'd be like and I'd be like, I'm just kidding. Come on now. Yeah, come on. And I think that's the other the other question that really gets my goat when I am recommending something to someone, and I think this is just a personal bugbear for me. I don't know whether you guys feel the same.

Somebody says asks me for a recommendation of something, a piece of audio software or an app or whatever, and I'm talking about regular ones, not something that's OD and strange. They ask me if it's accessible and-

are you really going to recommend something that's not..?

to be fair, I recommend things that aren't, quote, accessible. There is a difference between accessible and usable. That's probably a totally different topic for a totally different podcast, essentially. Yeah, I tend to sometimes do that.

Yeah, it's true. But generally, if somebody's asking me for a recommendation for a computer program or asking me for a recommendation for some specific way to do something, and they're like, Is it accessible? The rule of thumb I generally tend to use is if I can do it, you have the possibility of doing it. If it is absolutely impossible for me to do, I'm not going to recognize it. I'm not going to recommend it, I should say.

But that's interesting because everybody has a different definition of what's accessible, they have a different definition of what's usable. And yes, we could do a completely different podcast on that, but that comes into play when you're looking at your accommodations and stuff with further education. Well, Janie can have it in large print. Can you work with large

Oh my God, God, I've gotten that. I've gotten that so many times. I've gotten that so many times. I can't even oh, my God

Yeah. How big do we have to blow it up before you can see it? back to another topic? And procrastination is your enemy when you're studying these things, right? You go to do an assignment and you've put it off until the last minute because, well, let's say that book was more interesting, or they were rerunning Star Trek the Next Generation and Priorities, right? And some of the people are going to give you extensions and some of them aren't going to give you extensions. And I don't know whether it was me, but it used to really annoy me when the teacher would set an end date and say, okay, it's due on Friday, and then the whole class would belly ache and complain and carry on, and he'd go, all right, I'll give you till Tuesday next week to do it. And I'd be like, but we were supposed to have it done by Friday. We had it done. Why are there five more days or four more days of latitude just because everybody complained?

The only extensions I asked for, the only kind of extension thing was, like, extra time for tests or like if some of my professors did not like the idea of me taking my tests electronically. And so we would have to schedule with somebody where I used to go to school before I went to university. University small school. So they didn't have a center with PCs, with Jaws or whatever. They didn't have that. So I had to have my tests read to me and they had to be scheduled like we had to schedule. And so sometimes the disability person who did the whole disability coordination thing wasn't here on the day that I had to have my test done. And so I'd have to ask for an extension. I'd be like, she's not here, there's nothing I can do. There's nothing I can do about this because she was the only one.

But here's another interesting question. Have you ever had situation where they've got somebody to help you, like a scribe or somebody who took notes or whatever and they sucked? Okay. They did.

I have way too many stories about this one.

I want to know what happened.

Okay so- so- to be fair, most people in this particular situation, no offense, are going to suck. So let me explain. Unfortunately this matters not anymore due to the fact that it changes so much. But I got officially certified in Microsoft systems as a Microsoft certified systems engineer back in 2007. One of the hardest things about Certifying is when you Certify, you have to go take these tests on this computer and they're obviously not accessible to you. There's no way for you to read them with your screen reader

Because you can't. Well, and with some of these testing machines you can't modify, change, install anything on that machine.

Right. So that's the first problem. The second problem is that some of these questions for the test are actually a simulated desktop environment. You're given a question, you're given a task or a set of tasks to complete or a set of network roles or whatever to complete and you're given the desktop environment to do so in a simulation. Hello. If you're blind, you can't really access the simulation very well, can you? So what we used to have to do was part of the accommodations that Prometric at the time gave to us is we were allowed to hire a reader to read the exam. So you go and you fill out the thing with your voucher for a reader. They get you a reader and you get this reader that sometimes is not in general terms not a bad reader, computer language terms a really bad reader.

And one of the other things they do and I will be a little bit racist here because we're all a little bit racist turned up here. sometimes they will get the person who knows nothing about the subject area. So you get the jazz who has really thick Spanish accent or something to come and read the test for you and they're happy because they're getting paid whatever it is for the reader wage. Did you ever have that happen, Jess? Did they co opt?

Luckily I didn't. Luckily, every time that I had a reader, she actually was a reader. Like this is what she did. The problem is she was reading advanced network concepts and things like that, where that becomes very difficult. What also became difficult was she got better at this as I progressed in my studies. I'm very thankful. But as we were talking about before the simulation, you're supposed to do a certain set of tasks.

So what they are supposed to try and do for you when they're reading the simulation question to you is describe the simulation to you and describe the desktop to you and describe everything that they can see on that screen. Well, the problem is, if she doesn't know what something is, or he whoever, they're going to say, it kind of looks like a let's talk about mail, for instance. It kind of looks like a paperclip. Well, if you didn't know because you couldn't see before or whatever, you wouldn't realize that. Oh, okay, that's an email attachment or like the thing to open a file has the little paperclip on it now, right?

This is a different podcast, but I actually found that come up when if you are teaching a sighted person how to use a computer, your vocab and your training methods have to be very different. For example, I didn't realize, but with ICQ, for example, if the flower was closed, you were offline, but if the flower was open, you were online. You had no concept of that if you were using a screen reader. So all these things you don't know. And I actually had situations where people were helping me with diagram descriptions and things when I was doing the Cisco curriculum and stuff like that. Although they have quite reasonable diagram descriptions now. And I would pick an answer and the network guy would walk past and he's going, yeah, I wouldn't pick that one if I were you. And I'm like, you're not supposed to tell me. And he's like, yeah, but I can't sleep at night to watch you get it that wrong and you know better. So can you just look at that again? And I'm like, okay, I will. Oh yeah, this one.

I don't know if Cisco did this when you did the curriculum, but I know Microsoft did. So Microsoft again, I don't remember when it was, but we were earlier talking about different ways to do different things back when we were having the whole math conversation. But I was doing a certain task, whatever. I would have tasks that I need to do on the simulations. And Microsoft not only marks you for you doing the task, but they mark you based on the steps that you take to do the task.

And so I would sometimes do the task a way that I thought it should be done, but it wasn't necessarily the way they were looking for. So I'd get it partially right, but then I'd get marked partially wrong because I didn't do whatever steps they were looking right. So they're very specific sometimes. And the problem is if the reader isn't good at specifying that that's what they're looking for… -

Then you're kind of stuck.

Yeah, you're kind of sol there. So those tests like that, those computer tests, those A plus tests, those MCSE tests actually, I think it's like desktop support something. Anyway, they changed it. But the new Microsoft programming thingy, all of those tests, those security, plus Linux, plus all of those, they're hard because some of those are simulated and if you don't have a good reader, that can really hurt you and you fail because you're relying on them.

Yeah, I think that's the other thing that really comes up in this discussion is when you're doing higher education or whether you're doing a standard education of whatever sort, you're dependent on your team, okay. You're dependent on the people that are helping you out to make this happen.

And sometimes even in your regular high school, whatever. I've had the same issues that you face Jessica in high school, actually, I still suck at math and this carried on into college. We in the states have standardized tests and when I was in high school, it was tax.

She hates them.

I liked the reading tax and loved the math.

Math tax can kiss my ass. I struggled a lot and I jokingly call this Braille Dyslexia, depending on the day. Some days I just wasn't on my game and I'd get symbols mixed up or something. I don't know, something would go wrong or maybe I just sucked, I don't know. Whatever it was, I failed the tax test multiple times my senior year, my math tax test. And they were like, okay, well, we're going to try having someone sit in there and read it to you.

They get my VI teacher to read it. And to be completely honest, this bitch was dumb as a box of rocks. Sorry.

Dang.

No, she was

that's got the explicit tag on this podcast.

Yeah, please do.

But no, she really was. And like, the problem that I have with this, the problem that I had was she's reading a math test. I feel like if you're reading you need to have basic math. Don't be like, I think this is a left parenthesis. Two times.

So funny you mentioned that. Because I used to have my brothers and sisters and extended family read computer books and stuff to me and some of the vocabulary I had to get used to was two dots, one on top of the other two dots, comma two little funny things up in the air.

You have all the time in the world. And this is like my third time taking this freaking test. And she's just messing me around. And I'm just like, oh, my God, I don't know. And I'd be like, all right, can you set this up? Because one of the Maya comments I had a thing called a math window. And what this math window was, you had three or four boxes of magnets, like hundreds of little braille magnets per box, and you could set up equations if you absolutely had to. It was really cool.

And she would use the wrong symbols brackets to denote parentheses. Then what they had to do was they had to get I don't know. And they had to make him swear and, like, sign a thing and, like, probably sign away the blood of his first born child or something. They got my math teacher to read my test to me and set my equations up on the fourth and final time that I took my tax test and passed.

Oh, man, that's so rough.

That's why I said she was dumber than a box of rocks.

Yeah. And I think that the point I really want to take out of this because I'm actually going to have to hit stop in a minute because we've been actually talking for quite a while, over 40 minutes or whatever.

I mean, education is a big..-

We might have to do a couple of these to cover different things, but I would argue that all of this stuff has an impact on your mental wellbeing, on your general wellness. People can have trouble sleeping. They can have trouble relaxing. And it almost seems to me that if you are the type that goes out partying and drinking and stuff, you're not going to be able to wing this with all of the extra stuff you've got to do with any degree of ease. And I see a lot of vision impaired people who try extended education and they end up quite broken afterwards and it really does a number on their confidence, it does a number on their motivation and you can have a problem with your whole ethos to looking for jobs and looking for work and looking for employment because you have essentially got reinvent rebuild yourself after this adversity.

And it doesn’t help if you don’t have- if you have family that just thinks that if you go and you are like I'm not getting the help I need, I don’t get the commendation I need, you should be more flexible.. You don’t have supportive family that can mess you up too because not only you are struggling with the system which is supposed to help you have your family who you think it's like your cheerleader and you know- who you thought, expectations- well not expectations but.. Who you lean on for some support.

Expectations

Calling you out like thinking you're making excuses for yourself, while you are saying how it is. Like I'm having troubles in school and it's not because I'm getting bad grades, but it's not my fault, but it's got to be me because- well that’s just an excuse, I just had this happen. Like I'm speaking from experience here

And the problem Is people are looking for escape goat, looking for it to be somebody's fault

I had it happen too like- how to explain it. My mom, from a totally outsiders point of view, sometimes she would- it would look like she has a valid reason to complain and yell at me because I would get good grades but then I would struggle on a certain point because my accommodations would fail because whatever- but I would normally get good grades in subjects but then theres a year when I take the said subject, and its subject I'm usually really good at, and then I'm getting bad grades. So my mom you know would get mad thinking it is my fault and I can see why from outsiders perspective, but it literally was because I didn’t have the right-

And in fact and in some ones, you are damned if you do you are damned if you don’t. if you are too successful, there is an expectation that you will always be successful. And then it becomes not okay to fail in certain cases. Like failure is not an option anymore because people expect you to succeed

I feel like cuz I've had this conversation with my parents and we have gotten into fight, but when it comes down into it, the general- my general thing is you ask a sighted person do you know what- and this is just visually- do you know what visual impaired person has to go throguh when they are in educational system, and they say I wish that people would see, like you know you have those blindfold situations, where we going to teach you how to- no. put yourself into a blindfold and go advocate for your accommodations and go tell me how that works out for you. Go sit throguh a class and tell me how that works out for you. Because then maybe you wouldn’t be so quick to be like maybe you are making excuses. Like that’s my thing. Give people a little bit more of the benefit of the doubt, that’s what I want to say.

Absolutely, absolutely. But I mean you have to be able to recognize somebody is trying. And once you realize somebody is trying and doing what they can, then you absolutely need to give them credit for actually doing that, because that’s something that needs to be acknowledged, that somebody is actually making an effort. Because oyu know there are a lot of people who don’t try as well, but I would argue that if you don’t want to try don’t bother with university or college because it's not going to go well for you. You really need to be on your way preceding all of the things you are doing and you need to be able to follow those up in such way to make this things work for you as well as they can. Alright I'mi going to hit stop here at the moment because this is about as long as my episodes usually go. Thank you both for coming on, I had a surprising ammount of fun actually, we should do it again sometimes

I think if you get a long of interest, this is something you should probably continue. You know- this is a big subject for a lot of people

Well lets see if everyone likes it you can find me at @khoath on Twitter or email me at [email protected]. there's a tip jar. Feel free to give me money. I like it when people give me money. I'll even split it with my podcast hosts if I get and that you guys will get a little bit, too. But thank you both for coming along

Thanks for having us.

It's always fun. We'll have to do it again and lots of fun. I'm going to hit stop here and this will go out in the next few days.

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