A girl sits on a couch, laughing and smiling frequently. Her colorful, bright dress matches her vibrant personality.
A black Labrador, Olivia, is sprawled on the carpet contentedly. She’s never too far away from her owner, criminal justice sophomore Katherine Chavez.
In conversation, Katherine has a peculiar tendency to look above the head of whomever she’s speaking with, like she expects the person to be taller than he or she really is.
It’s a rough subject to bring up, as if calling attention to the elephant in the room. But why does she do that?
The answer: Katherine can’t see.
As a child, Katherine suffered from retinoblastoma, a cancer of the light-sensitive tissue in the back of the eye. Two months before her eighth birthday, Katherine lost her sight. She only sees in shades of gray, depending on the lighting.
Before Olivia, Katherine used a cane to help her get around, but it slowed her walking pace and “held back a lot of my independence,” she said.
So Katherine decided to get Olivia. She trained with Guiding Eyes for the Blind for a month in Yorktown, N.Y., to learn how to work with the Labrador. That was almost two years ago. Olivia helps Katherine maneuver around objects, guiding her to class and other places she needs to go.
Katherine wants to someday become a lawyer, a career path she admits was inspired in part by the television series “Criminal Minds.” She has visited juvenile justice courts and met with visually impaired lawyers, experiences she says have strengthened her determination to realize her dreams.
“If other people can do it, I’m capable of doing it as well,” she said.
Katherine, a lifelong resident of Phoenix, attended Glendale High School. She participated in clubs like Students Against Destructive Decisions and Interact Club and was involved with cheer squad.
That’s right, cheer squad.
“It was a lot easier than I thought it was going to be,” Katherine said. Her fellow cheerleaders taught her the complex choreography by moving her arms and legs. “I’m a pretty quick learner,” she said.
That kind of quick learning allowed Katherine to become fluent in Braille in just 14 months. She can listen to a screen reader rattle off text at over 150 words per minute. To the average ear, the robot voice from her laptop is nearly incomprehensible — one or two understandable words may emerge from the breakneck stream of syllables, but it’s almost impossible for any person with sight to keep up.
Katherine understands the voice with ease, and she has a goal of being able to understand 250 words per minute.
Despite living close to the Downtown campus, Katherine chose to live in the dorms at Taylor Place last year and this year, a decision based on her desire to “rely on just myself when there’s nobody around.”
At first, her biggest challenge on campus was meeting new people, she said.
“I’m really shy, so I’m kind of scared to meet people,” she said. “I was scared that I wasn’t going to know people or that I was going to be alone in my classes. Olivia helped me a lot, because people started asking me questions about my dog, which led to conversations.”
But attention to Olivia has sometimes distracted the dog from her duty, Katherine said.
“People tended to, as I’m walking with her, call her and try to pet her,” Katherine said. “But once people got used to seeing her around, everything calmed down.”
Her friend Ciara Wilson, a health science sophomore, said she’s seen remarkable growth in Katherine over the past year.
“She was hesitant to ask people for help, and she probably cared a lot more about what people thought of her,” Wilson said. “But now, she does her own thing. She’s not afraid to ask for help, she’s not afraid to be outgoing, meet new people, and try new things.”
Besides the difficulty to acclimate to campus, Katherine has also faced problems with Blackboard. The online course-management system used by ASU is often incompatible with her screen reader. She dropped an English 101 class because her professor “was not working with me whatsoever,” she said.
Generally, however, Katherine said her teachers have been accommodating and that ASU’s Disability Resource Center is “one of the best” there is.
The resource center provides Katherine with electronic textbooks, double the time for exams and a scribe for in-class essays.
Students with disabilities should be viewed as “students first,” said Lance Harrop, assistant director of the resource center. “Certainly there is going to be the ongoing challenge of accessibility. In general, students with disabilities face the same challenges as any other student.”
Harrop’s words echo with Katherine’s own attitude.
“People were scared or afraid to offend me in any way,” Katherine said. But now, “people are pretty open, and they treat me the same way as everyone else, which is really good, because that’s what I want from everybody.”
Contact the reporter at bkutzler@asu.edu
