From an email asking about what it's like to get assistive services for classes, among other things.
The frustrating thing is that I feel like the system of "getting accessibility for your classes, " while helpful, gives me way less flexibility in my classes than I'd otherwise have. I mean, add/drop is meaningless when you know you've spent at least 20 hours arranging transcription services for this class and would have to reschedule it for that class and the instructor's already put in time to accommodate you and you'd need to re-negotiate everything with another instructor and...
That having been said, I don't see a way out of that. I mean, it does take more effort/energy/customization to set up a class to be accessible for a particular student.
I guess the way out would be to set them all up to be accessible from the beginning, but... resource constraints, right? Still, I would love to just have one semester -- even one day! -- at a conference or a school where everything was... captioned, or something, just so I could feel what it is like to be able to walk freely around a world and have my presence forethought in all of it (to borrow a wonderful phrase from Sumana).
I've also been wondering whether I'm actually an introvert, which is the way I've tested on the Myers-Briggs every time. Thing is, every time I've taken that test, I've found myself muttering "...well, this answer, but it's because listening is exhausting," or similar, on the questions that are probably the introvert/extrovert ones. Online, I'm... not as introverted, and definitely gain energy from talking with people -- I don't need to strain to understand them!
Would my personality and social life be different if I had normal hearing? Probably. (Do I love the friends I have? Yes. Would I want to change this? I don't think so; I value the empathy development it's given me.