Walking the road unseen

Curious students look up from their plates. A friendly hand removes a chair before it becomes an obstacle, and someone tells him to turn a bit to the left. Wai uses his free hand to collect a tray and then heads to the back, where members of the Whitman Dining Services staff tell him what’s on the menu and fix him a plate, complete with a bowl of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

“The food is good!” Wai said, adding that he misses plain white rice.

Wai is blind. More specifically, he has a rare condition called Leber’s congenital amaurosis, which causes the progressive degeneration of retinal photoreceptors, explained Dr. Julia Haller Gottsch ’76, a University trustee who is chief of ophthalmology at the Wills Eye Institute in Philadelphia.

Though Wai can perceive the intensity and direction of light, he has never seen colors. At age 5, he “could catch a slow-moving Frisbee” and could read some print, which is how he learned the shapes of letters and numbers. By middle school, though, his disease had developed enough to necessitate a full transition to Braille. And now? “I couldn’t tell you what you look like,” he said.

Though he hasn’t seen a single one of Princeton’s stone facades, he can offer a unique perspective on the school. Office of Disability Services (ODS) director Eve Tominey said two University students with visual impairments and two with hearing impairments are currently registered with the office. This number only reflects those who have “self-identified” and requested the academic accommodations offered by ODS, she noted, adding that the University graduated a blind student in 2003.

“It’s not hectic,” Wai said of life at Princeton. “Peaceful, but not isolated.” He has also found the people very friendly and willing to help. “I’m always walking around campus smiling. The setting is great.”

A National Merit Scholar, Wai won a $3,000 scholarship from the National Federation of the Blind for his “ability to help other blind students” and also posted the highest overall score at Pennsylvania’s Academic Decathlon last spring.

A native of Towamencin, Pa., Wai said he is enjoying his classes and remains unsure of what he will major in.

“I’ve got two years to figure it out,” he said. In the meantime, he draws on a variety of resources that help him study, including screen-reading software called JAWS that he uses to browse the internet, check his e-mail and read PDF files from the organic chemistry textbook, which he acquired from the publisher.

JAWS also adapts online readings for his freshman seminar. Pequod and the ODS helped him scan some of his texts and convert them into hard-copy Braille, and for macroeconomics, he relies on audio textbook narrations, a method he prefers when there are many graphs that need to be described.

Besides taking notes at every class, Wai tapes lectures with an Olympus digital voice recorder and discusses any important graphics with other students after class. The point is to “[find] different ways of getting the same information,” he explained.

For fun, he takes Aikido classes in Dillon Gymnasium and has a piano lesson every other week in Woolworth Hall.

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Wai brings his white cane with him everywhere on campus, and for the past two summers, he has taught cane travel to young children. “We are not designed to navigate that way, from an evolutionary perspective,” he said. “I’m not going to lie. It can be devilishly frustrating at times.”

But Wai said he doesn’t let this frustration dampen his mood. “In general, you don’t really think about [being blind] … You work it into the way that you think,” he explained.

Gottsch pointed out recent gene therapy studies have achieved some success in treating Leber’s cases. Though no such therapy exists for Wai’s variant of the disease, he considers it a “matter of time” until there is.

Wai isn’t holding his breath, though. “I’m doing quite nicely,” he said. “If I got a little vision back, I would be thankful for it, but it would just be sort of like a bonus.”