Jennifer Morash

I don't remember a time in my life that I was capable of writing, but didn't. Clearly, there was a time I both couldn't and didn't, I wasn't precisely born with a pencil in my hand and knowledge of the language in my head, but I have memories of writing things going back pretty far. Silly things, mostly, but I wasn't trying to impress anyone. During my life,I've had periods where I didn't, that's true, though with one exception, never very long ones. I've had much, much longer ones where no one ever saw a word that I wrote, but that's entirely different. I still was writing. But why? What drives me to have once upon a time picked up a pen, and these days pick up my keyboard? Particularly since a lot of the time, no one saw it or was intended to? By that token, I can't be doing it for attention. The answer is this. I get ideas in my head that just won't go away until I write them down. If I'm lucky, this happens during...

My heart isn't formed as one would really expect a heart to be formed. 　 In fact, it probably closely resembles what a heart looks like when I, without sight, try to draw it. 　 But I love this thing. It is a piece of rose quartz, so in my mind's eye, it has a soft pink hue to it, though I've never actually asked anyone what colour it truly is, for I might be disappointed if it isn't the colour inside my mind. 　 My malformed heart is cold to the touch when you pick it up, but it warms very quickly. It has a smooth surface, almost to the point of feeling silky. Small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, but large enough to serve its purpose in life. 　 I call it misshapen, because it more or less is. One of the two humps at the top comes up further than the other, though there is a dip between them that is pleasant to run my finger back and forth over. One of the downward sloping edges that leads towards the nadir is convex, the opposite side is conc...

Adaptive tech has come a long, long way since I was younger. A lot of it is insanely helpful, much of it practical in day to day life. 　 But that isn't as much fun as gaming is, right? So let's talk about that. 　 On the surface, gaming seems like the sort of thing that the blind can't readily participate in, but there's some pretty good ones. All of the games I play are on my phone. There are some that are great for PC's, but my machine isn't really set up for that, so I stick with those for the phone. Right now, IOS definitely has the lead in this, a lot of the things I play are IOS only, though I believe that Android is gaining ground. Some of them are outright designed for the blind, and some weren't, but have developers that figured out how to make them accessible and diligently worked to make them so. 　 Land of Livia is a "idle RPG" style game. That means that it was designed to be played at intervals, so you don't have to s...

Last week, I spoke about how much I love Disney World in a general sense. This week, I want to talk about doing Disney World with a disability. The short version: It's more doable than you might think. Now, for the long version. My own disability is visual impairment. I am functionally blind, with no vision at all in the right eye and only light perception and occasional colour in the left. At first blush, you may think this ought to make a theme park unfeasible for me. After all, Disney is so visual, right? All those dark rides with their clever animatronics, , all those shows, all that attention put into making the areas of the park distinct. You would be wrong. Sure, the visual element is wonderful. I've been there with considerably more vision, I know the parks are beautiful. But if you're a Disney goer, I urge you to take time to sit down somewhere and close your eyes. Really pay attention to what you hear and smell, and you will find that there is still a tex...

So, I am a huge Disney fangirl. Seriously, people. If you could but see my youtube viewing history. Or my FaceBook newsfeed, for that matter. I don't remember a time when I didn't. 　 I was born in the mid seventies, my formative years that I remember were mostly the 80's. Hard as it may be for younger folks to imagine, television offerings were more limited. But every week, the CBC aired The Wonderful World of Disney. That was my gateway at first. That, and Robin Hood. You know, the one where Robin Hood is a fox. I remember seeing that in the theatres, though looking at when it's actual release year was, I now know it was one of Disney's re-releases. 　 Then, on Christmas day when I was six, my sister and I got a fabulous present. We discovered that our parents, grandmother and, yes, even the two of us, were going to Disney. 　 Better still - for me, anyway - was that they had chosen for us to be there during my seventh birthday. My sister jokes that s...