Spring Break
The Daily OrangeJagdish Chander adapts to life at SU as a blind student
By Darryl Slater
Posted: 11/7/02, 3:57 AM EST Section: News
***
It sounds like gibberish.
Chander’s checking his e-mail, and his JAWS program he received as a gift is reading it to him faster than the Micro Machines guy. The speakers spit out the sentences at 500 words a minute.
He’s sitting in a white plastic lawn chair. To his left lies his mattress — no bed, no box spring — covered with a thin blanket. In the corner, three suitcases are draped with clothes and towels.
The room smells like the coffee he’s sipping from the white mug that sits on a paper towel atop his desk.
As Chander taps the keyboard, you decide to test him.
“How can you understand what the program is saying?” you ask.
“It didn’t happen in a day,” he says. “When I first started using the program, I was at 50 words a minute. But now, when I skim, I go at about 700 words a minute.”
You still don’t believe him and ask him to summarize the e-mail he just heard.
He correctly tells you it was a useless forward from a listserv that told him to visit a Web site where he could find a creepy Halloween picture.
“It tells you that if you look hard enough,” Chander says, “you can see a Civil War ghost in the picture.”
That he can’t is sadly ironic.
***
Chander hates pity.
He doesn’t need help but kindly thanks people for it anyway.
After all, he’d sat shotgun and directed you here from the Center on Human Policy’s offices near Marshall Street, where he works as a graduate assistant. By Chander’s estimate, his four-room apartment in the Vincent Apartment complex — off Comstock Avenue, past Manley Field House — is a mile and a half from main campus.
That’s about a 40-minute walk, and Chander should know, because he walked it almost every night until last week, when it started getting cold.
“People ask, ‘How the hell do you make that walk?’ ” he says.
It sounds like gibberish.
Chander’s checking his e-mail, and his JAWS program he received as a gift is reading it to him faster than the Micro Machines guy. The speakers spit out the sentences at 500 words a minute.
He’s sitting in a white plastic lawn chair. To his left lies his mattress — no bed, no box spring — covered with a thin blanket. In the corner, three suitcases are draped with clothes and towels.
The room smells like the coffee he’s sipping from the white mug that sits on a paper towel atop his desk.
As Chander taps the keyboard, you decide to test him.
“How can you understand what the program is saying?” you ask.
“It didn’t happen in a day,” he says. “When I first started using the program, I was at 50 words a minute. But now, when I skim, I go at about 700 words a minute.”
You still don’t believe him and ask him to summarize the e-mail he just heard.
He correctly tells you it was a useless forward from a listserv that told him to visit a Web site where he could find a creepy Halloween picture.
“It tells you that if you look hard enough,” Chander says, “you can see a Civil War ghost in the picture.”
That he can’t is sadly ironic.
***
Chander hates pity.
He doesn’t need help but kindly thanks people for it anyway.
After all, he’d sat shotgun and directed you here from the Center on Human Policy’s offices near Marshall Street, where he works as a graduate assistant. By Chander’s estimate, his four-room apartment in the Vincent Apartment complex — off Comstock Avenue, past Manley Field House — is a mile and a half from main campus.
That’s about a 40-minute walk, and Chander should know, because he walked it almost every night until last week, when it started getting cold.
“People ask, ‘How the hell do you make that walk?’ ” he says.
