Visually Impaired People at University

To apply to university in the UK, you have to submit an application to UCAS, which stands for Universities and College Admissions Service. In this post, I'll tell you about my experiences of applying to university through UCAS. First a short recap. I'm a visually impaired student who is currently doing a PhD at University College London. I applied to study physics in 2010 with start in 2011 and thought I'd tell you a bit about the application process. I am diagnosed with albi

Hi everyone, I’m Claire and I have been visually impaired from birth. I have about 10% vision with a small visual field and can see shapes and colours. I studied Languages and Philosophy as an undergraduate (including an Erasmus year abroad in Salamanca, Spain which was lots of fun) and then did a Masters in Translation and Interpreting. I now work as a technical translator for a software company. In my spare time, I enjoy the thrill of rock-climbing (both indoor and outdoor)

How do you tell others that you are visually impaired? I talk about my own experience and my strategies when it comes to informing others about your disability. When I went to primary school, we occasionally had new people join our class. Whenever this happened, my mother would visit school at the beginning of term to tell the class about my visual impairment. She'd explain what it meant, and let the other children look through a folded plastic pocket in order for them to und

What does a visually impaired physicist have to think about when attending a scientific conference? This post is intended for VIPs who want to know what it's like to work as a scientist with a visual impairment, but also for organisers, speakers and poster-makers who want to improve accessibility for VIPs at conferences. Conferences. Big events with lots of talks, discussions, meetings and (if you're lucky) a bunch of free food. I enjoy attending conferences - I get to travel

Hey there, I’m Nathan. I have just finished my masters degree in Computer Science and I work as a full-time software engineer in Amsterdam. My eyesight is around 20%. Let me further introduce myself. I grew up in the Netherlands and started studying Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit in 2009. It was a very obvious choice for me. I taught myself programming at the age of 15 and was reasonably experienced when I graduated high school. During those years, I spent time bu

You've just been accepted on the degree course of your dreams, congratulations! Here are eight things you might want to consider before you head off to university. All VIPs I know who have successfully completed a university degree have something in common: they are masters of planning ahead. To help you do this too, here are the most important things that a VIP should think about before going to university. While this is by no means an exhaustive list, it should cover the mo

In this post, I talk about experimental physics and how a visually impaired student can get through undergraduate (and postgraduate) physics labs. One of the things I miss while working with theoretical physics is having a warning sign on my door that says 'Warning: Laser' or 'Warning: Radiation!'. I liked seeing them when I walked into the lab, they made me feel cool. Let me start this off by talking briefly about experimental physics as a topic, and then move into the speci

How can a visually impaired student see the board in lectures and seminars? Here I explain how I solved this problem and was able to follow along in theoretical physics lectures. In a lecture or seminar, I typically can't see what's written on the blackboard (yes, in physics we do still occasionally use blackboards). When I started my university degree, my biggest challenge was figuring out how I could follow the lectures in real-time. In this post, I'm going to tell you how

How much can I see and how does it affect my everyday life? I explain the extent of my vision loss here to provide context for my other posts. As you can perhaps imagine, there are plenty of embarrassing stories that come with being visually impaired - I have ignored people waving at me, failed to recognise someone I just had a long and deep conversation with and when I was about 10 I walked into a stranger's house by mistake, thinking it was my friend's. All pretty awkward s

Hi there! My name is Sofia and this is a short entry about myself. I grew up in Sweden and later moved to England to study physics at Imperial College London. You might be curious as to why I chose to study physics. My favourite author to is Isaac Asimov, whose compelling stories about galactic empires and robots made me dream of distant futures with intergalactic space travel. Once I had completed my early education, I figured the closest I could get to science fiction was p