#visual disabilities

Mayara Massa is an amazing, 24 year old psychologist, disability advocate, blogger and vlogger from the Brazilian city of São Paulo.

Mayara has been a wheelchair user for all her life because of Osteogenesis Imperfecta. This is a genetic disorder which weakens the connective tissue and results in fragile and malformed bones. At birth, Mayara already had several broken bones throughout her body and she had a countless amount of fractures ever since. She was also born with a severe degree of both scoliosis and kyphosis (an unnatural sideways and front-to-back curvature of her spine) and has been paralyzed from her waist down for all her life.

Mayara is known for her positive attitude. The fact that she’s a full time wheelchair user doesn’t really matter to her, however, her fragile bones could be a real burden for her as a kid. When she grew older though, the amount of fractures seriously decreased, and she hasn't had a single fracture in over two years!

After graduating with a degree in psychology at the “Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro”, Mayara now runs her own practice. She specializes in problems involving physical, mental and visual disabilities. All the stories she’s heard from her patients(supplemented with her own experiences as a wheelchair user) have inspired her to start advocating for disability rights, inclusion and accessibility issues. Besides that, she thinks it’s important to show the world that people with disabilities can still be successful, attractive and can lead independent and fulfilling lives.

Besides her busy schedule, Mayara loves to swim and travel. She has lots of friends and is in a happy relationship.

We miss things.

When driving, we can look up and down a road that we intend to turn into, with no intersections for blocks worth of space in either direction, see it as totally, absolutely clear, and pull out to find someone is suddenly slamming on the breaks behind us. And when double checking with a passenger learn that the car was there. We just literally didn't see it.

Here's a sample of it on a smaller scale. See the triangle between these two lines of text?

When we were reading this page, it wasn't there for us. Literally, there was just a big space, which was unusual for this piece of work. We're used to triangles separating sections within a chapter. The complete lack of a triangle jarred us enough that we had to look away from the window for a period of time and think about something else before coming back to the page in order to take in the new scene as a new scene.

When we came back the triangle was there.

We didn't reload the page. The code is pretty simple. We've had enough experiences with this that we're pretty sure we know what happened.

We experienced a kind of hallucination in which it was missing, and where there was just a big blank space there, which we had stared at and searched with our eyes for several seconds before looking away.

This is how it works with typos, too. We can, in fact, go several days, weeks, months, or years of rereading the same material and seeing things as if they are spelled correctly or with the correct grammar, when it's really not. We know how things are spelled. We know grammar pretty damn well.

If there is a typo in our work it is because we literally cannot see it, and we need you to do so.

"Oh, hey! There's a typo here, if you wanna catch it," is a great way to let us know.

College guide for students who have visual disabilities