Through His Eyes

For one blind student — and other UA community members with disabilities — living, learning and working in an environment long reported to be inaccessible and hostile to disability can feel like a “new battle every day.”

By Sarah Komar

When I met Mark Marinoni outside his residence hall on a gloomy Tuesday afternoon in late February, a bitterly cold wind was blowing across campus. In typical college-student fashion, we had both dressed in jackets too light for the weather and forgotten to bring gloves or hats, and our teeth chattered as we walked the short distance from Maple Hill South to Fulbright Dining Hall for lunch — Marinoni occasionally stumbling a bit off course because of his long-term balance issues, then cracking jokes about it. 

Blessedly, though, it had not yet started snowing or pouring down freezing rain. Less than 24 hours later Marinoni, 22, would be stuck in his dorm for three days straight, watching news coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and surviving off of pre-made bratwursts and sandwiches delivered just before a winter storm by his vigilant mother. 

For Marinoni, who is legally blind, there would be no slipping, sliding and laughing with friends pretending to ice skate on the frozen-over quad lawn. There would be no sledding down campus’ many ideal hills with makeshift sleds ranging from cardboard boxes to kayaks — a popular winter pastime for UA students.

With an inch of ice and snow accumulation, venturing out of his dorm even to go to the dining hall was too dangerous on sidewalks that are notoriously treacherous after winter storms, even for those who can see the icy patches. On the first night of a three-day campus closure, after the precipitation had ceased, Marinoni attempted to leave his residence hall, but slipped a bit on the building’s steps and turned right back around.

This incident was just another in a long list of ways Marinoni’s daily life and college experience is painfully different from those of his classmates. The sophomore political science major has had only a little residual sight since he was 10 years old and a cancerous tumor put pressure on his optic nerve. Although the tumor was successfully removed in a procedure followed by months of paralysis, grueling physical and speech therapy, and several reconstructive surgeries, his eyesight, balance,and coordination were never the same. 

Some things, like playing sports or reading a physical book, will never again be possible for Marinoni, who grew up a popular student and all-star baseball player riding dirt bikes in his free time in Farmington, Arkansas.

However, Marinoni thinks other things, like being successful in school on a similar level to his classmates, could be much less of a daily struggle if the UofA was more amenable to helping students get the accommodations they need. Right now, he is “pretty much having to work like 10 times harder than most people would just to do the simplest of tasks,” he told me over the dry pulled pork and roasted carrots he’d struggled to identify and serve himself.

“I’m thinking about getting a white cane and just walking around with that,” Marinoni said. “Because I hate when people just assume that I’ve got everything and that I know how to do it and that I will be able to do everything that everybody else does in the exact same way, with the exact same proficiency and whatever.”

Mark Marinoni visits Fulbright Dining Hall’s dessert station after a meal Feb. 22, placing cookies on his plate without being able to see what kind he is choosing (the station does not have labels placed on top of the sneeze guard, as some do). Because Marinoni worries about holding up the line, he usually sticks to food stations that don’t change, like the pizza counter or the grab-and-go refrigerator. // Photo by Sarah Komar

Americans with Disabilities Act, first passed in 1990 and updated over the years to include provisions prohibiting employment and education discrimination, requires any spaces open to the public to be physically accessible to people with disabilities. It also requires that, unless it would create an “undue burden,” employers and educational institutions make “reasonable accommodations” for employees and students with disabilities.

According UA Office of Equal Opportunity and Compliance’s statement of nondiscrimiation, “It is the policy of the University of Arkansas to provide equal access and opportunity to qualified persons with disabilities in compliance with Section 503 and 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, as amended; the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990; and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. The University prohibits discrimination based on disability in all services, programs and activities, aspects of the application process and employment relationship. The University will make good faith efforts to provide reasonable accommodations to applicants, employees, students, visitors, and participants in programs and services.”

UA departments responsible for overseeing ADA compliance and accommodations requests include the Center for Educational Access, which provides student educational resources and accommodations, and the OEOC, which manages physical accessibility and most other accommodations services.

When Marinoni transferred to the UofA in January 2021 after spending two years at Northwest Arkansas Community College, he expected the CEA would have everything he needed to succeed. After all, the Disability Resource Center at NWACC had provided him with a range of human and technological assistance during his time there, and the UofA is a much larger institution with an endowment of $1.7 billion. 

The NWACC DRC offers eligible students accommodations including registration help & counseling, student volunteer note takers, permission to audio record lectures, preferential classroom seating, special testing conditions, extended time for written assignments, consultation on use and acquisition of auxiliary aids, sign language interpreter services, videophone usage and more, according to its website. The CEA’s site does not list all accommodations it offers or has offiered, but individual plans are tailored to students’ needs after they meet with an access plan counselor and provide documentation of disability.

But after traversing the university’s many computer labs, Marinoni discovered the campus did not have a single computer with an operational large-screen monitor, a tool crucial for him to do schoolwork. Marinoni called the CEA to request one be installed so he could study somewhere other than his dorm, where he has a large monitor given to him by his aunt and equipped with magnifying and screen-reading software. He was flabbergasted he even had to ask.

“It’s hard being a legally blind man in a sighted world,” Marinoni said. “And you know, this is the University of Arkansas, a public university, so you would think that, you know, the CEA or just the university faculty in general…they would have come across the issue of not having large-screen monitors in the past.”

Bill Cash is the director of the Little Rock office of the U.S. Equal Opportunity Commission and has been working on ADA cases related to employment since the law’s inception. “Undue hardship frequently kind of translates to money,” Cash said, but most accommodations requested by individuals with physical disabilities tend to be relatively affordable — under $500 in most cases he deals with — and easy to obtain or implement. 

“Twenty years ago, it might be a different discussion,” Cash said. “But getting monitors and having adaptive software is so much more affordable than it used to be. That’s a fairly typical accommodation for an individual with a visual impairment to use. And there’s so many great accommodations for people who have visual impairments now that were not available just a few years ago. And cost-wise, it’s going to be hard for an employer to argue undue hardship.”

Marinoni waited more than eight months for a monitor to be installed in the Arkansas Union’s Tech Spot. The monitor and its accompanying tower were finally set up several weeks into the fall semester, he said.

“At that time they said it was a supply chain issue,” Marinoni said. “And so I kind of said, ‘Yeah, okay, I can kinda see that, but at the same time, you can just go to Best Buy and get one, or to Walmart or something.’”

Mark Marinoni reads a converted textbook excerpt for his urban planning class on the large-screen monitor in his dorm room in Maple Hill South, where he lives alone. He does most of his studying on his personal dorm computer, because the single other large-screen monitor on the UA campus, in the Union Tech Spot, does not always work correctly, he said. // Photo by Sarah Komar

Buying a 55-inch curved Samsung TV at Best Buy and connecting it to his computer is exactly what Brent Williams, an associate professor of counselor education and supervision in the rehabilitation counseling graduate program, did when he felt university officials were dragging their feet on outfitting his office with a large monitor, he said. Williams, who has a form of macular degeneration, is also legally blind and relies on his large monitor and on inverting white backgrounds with black text to work without exhausting his eyes. 

Williams has experienced or witnessed a range of accessibility barriers and official resistance to providing accommodations in his 20 years at the UofA, he said. In his time as a student, a professor and a researcher, WIlliams has attended or visited many campuses that he found to be much more physically accessible and responsive to accommodations requests, including the University of Illinois, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of California. 

“Most of the trouble I’ve had with accommodations (at the UofA) has been ‘We’re doing for you what we do for everybody else.’ And it’s like, ‘Yeah, but that doesn’t work.’ ‘Well, I’m sorry, you get what you get.’ (It’s) the rigidity of conceptualizing or implementing a process that is anything outside of what is normally done.”

A major issue Williams has faced at the UofA is inaccessible technology, including software and websites used by the university whose text and backgrounds can’t be inverted. The latest example is Workday, the third-party human resources program the UofA deployed about a year ago. 

After lengthy email exchanges with his department head and university IT employees, plus 12 unanswered tickets submitted to Workday, Williams once had to resort to having a graduate assistant submit performance evaluations on his employees, because he physically could not do it. “I don’t wake up in the morning and go, ‘If I can just make IT angry with me, that would make my day,’” Williams said. “And so it’s just that death by 1,000 pinpricks of ‘I don’t like being that guy.’”

Throughout his time here, Williams has often felt he had to fight and pester inflexible officials to give him necessary, reasonable accommodations. He once spent weeks trying to convince supervisors to let him hire a car service to take him to a conference in Little Rock, which was against standard university policy, despite having funding through an external grant and not needing any money from UA coffers. “Because that was against their policy for all faculty, they weren’t about to let me do it,” Williams said. “But that goes to that rigidity.”

Williams eventually called his federal grant manager for permission and hired the service without university approval so he could get to Little Rock. Still, the officials never fully conceded that making an accommodation for him was both reasonable and legally mandated, he said.

“We used to get this from employers a lot: ‘If we make all these special changes for Jimmy over here, everybody else will want special changes,’” said Cash, the Little Rock EEOC director. “And I said, ‘Well, under the law, Jimmy has a federally protected right to have these changes made; the other people don’t.’ So there is no reverse discrimination when we’re talking about the (ADA). But I think there’s still some of that residual, ‘We want to treat everybody exactly the same’ kind of idea.”

UA transportation policies are in place for liability reasons — if a car transporting faculty members were to crash, the university could be sued, said OEOC accommodation specialist Alli Johnson, who herself has a disability and is working on developing a peer mentoring program for staff with disabililites. Still, when faculty or staff members request accommodations, Johnson and others in the OEOC try to work out an agreement between the requestee, the requestee’s supervisor and the university, whether full implementation or a compromise, Johnson said.

“Our accommodations process is so by the book and by the policy, that [greievance filings do] not happen for the most part,” Johnson said. ”It’s a very rare situation that I outright deny your accommodation…It’s very rare that it’s a problem that [officials] are not following policy.”

Some battles Williams and his students, many of whom have disabilities, still fight more than 30 years after the passage of the ADA are surprisingly basic. When I visited him in his office, he brought me into the hall and showed me the only fully wheelchair-accessible bathroom in the Graduate Education Building — another accommodation he says he pestered administrators to install.

The automatic door’s mechanism was broken such that when I pressed the “open button,” the latch stuck and the door did not swing open. “That mechanism has been in actual working order for maybe two weeks out of every semester since that restroom was installed three years ago,” Williams told me. “One of my students in a motorized wheelchair got trapped in there twice and had to holler for help.”

Keeping accessibility equipment such as automatic doors and elevators in working condition is not only essential for the dignity of people with disabilities, it’s a legal requirement of employers and public institutions, Cash said. “And you’re not doing these people any favors,” he said. “This is the law.”

Although he can walk without assistive devices, Marinoni too has faced physical accessibility challenges. When he arrived at the UofA, he discovered the voice signal at the busy  Maple Street/Garland Avenue crosswalk was broken. He asked Williams, a friend of his mother’s, for advice, and Williams helped Marinoni push the OEOC and the CEA to get it repaired weeks later. The signal was broken for two years, during which time Williams had repeatedly nudged campus officials to fix it, he said. In response, OEOC staff asked city officials to repair it, to no avail, said J’onelle Colbert-Diaz, UA director of accommodation and accessibility Services and ADA Coordinator.

“If you put that type of equipment in, maintaining it is very important,” Cash said. “And especially if you’re an individual who has a visual impairment, and you’ve used that intersection in the past, and you’ve relied on that type of equipment, it’s very unfortunate that they wouldn’t get that fixed. Yeah, that’s a head scratcher, why you would let that go on for two years.”

Maintaining equipment, providing accommodations for individuals with disabilities and otherwise keeping campus accessible is a constant, ongoing process that involves working with departments across campus including the CEA, Facilities Management, and Information Technology Services, Colbert-Diaz said.

“One of the things I’m really happy about is that everybody who I work with in those different areas, they’re all coming to the table with a concept of, ‘Okay, so how do we get this in place, and what needs to happen? Let’s get the right people to the table,’” Colbert-Diaz said. “Everybody really works to try to address it as much as they can, up front, as thoroughly as possible…I hold firm to the concept that it’s better for us to do all the legwork upfront, get all those questions answered, get everything in place once than to have to keep revisiting later on.”

Mark Marinoni demonstrates the assistive technologies he used to read what is on his computer screen in his UA dorm room. // Video shot by Sarah Komar

Marinoni frequently struggles in his classes because of his visual impairment and difficulties obtaining accommodations, he said. He is currently taking a statistics course in which he says he learns nothing during lectures because he can’t see the board. CEA employees attempted to find a classmate enrolled in the course to take notes for him, but no student volunteered, so he has been relying on his professor’s office hours. He tried Class+ tutoring services, offered in the newly opened Student Success Center — an oxymoron, Marinoni told me — but without a large-screen monitor there, the sessions were nearly as useless as the lectures.

The day I joined Marinoni for his daily campus routine, we skipped out on the stats lecture. We instead sat in his dorm room drinking Coke and talking about his campus social life — trouble navigating Razorback Transit and university web pages, plus anxiety about how people will respond to his blindness means he doesn’t have much of one. He also opened up about his family; of his eight siblings and step-siblings, he and his sister have the closest bond, I learned when he got choked up talking about her. The time felt much better spent than it would have been in the classroom.

“I don’t really want to sit there and stare, wondering what’s going on, because I’ve done that enough in my life, throughout high school and everything,” Marinoni said. “I thought it would be better in higher education, but it’s not.”

When Marinoni was enrolled in a math course at NWACC, the Disability Resource Center provided a designated notetaker who accompanied him each day and took large-print, handwritten notes on industrial-sized paper in a huge binder the center’s staff ordered. Not getting such assistance at a much larger institution discourages Marinoni, he said. “It makes me want to just drop the class here at the university and try and take it again at NWACC or somewhere that I know would do what I need,” he said. 

“Due to limitations of related privacy provisions enshrouded in applicable law,” NWACC Driector of Disability Resources Amy Robertson-Gann could not comment on exactly how her center operates or what its budget is, she said.

Keeping up with readings-based classes can be challenging too, Marinoni said, because professors often upload them in inaccessible formats not friendly to screen-reading technology, such as PDFs or photocopies. When he needs something converted to a Word document, he submits the material to the CEA, waits two days to two weeks for the new file to be uploaded to the portal, then downloads and reads it.

“I think it would be amazing if the CEA looked at the class beforehand and made sure that the teachers upload a readable format…beforehand, instead of putting all that responsibility on the [student] helping themselves,” Marinoni said.

Beth Gray, a visually impaired graduate student who has been enrolled at the UofA on and off for about 20 years, had so much trouble keeping up with classes that used inaccessible textbooks that she was dismissed for academic reasons from her program of study, rehab counseling. She is currently taking general courses and appealing the decision.

Gray thinks much of the UofA’s accessibility and accommodation problems lie with an inability of university administrators and professors to recognize the uniqueness of disability and importance of flexibility. “Like (with) a pile of snow, every snowflake looks the same — it’s all white,” Gray said. “But then if you look at it individually, you see the individual needs and markings, and all that kind of stuff.” Mandating an intensive, detailed disability education program, designed with input from disabled students, for staff could go a long way, Gray said.

For Williams, it’s all about categorization and prioritization. Until officials and faculty from the Board of Trustees down to professors see disability as a crucial part of campus diversity, and recruit “a critical mass” of students and staff with disabilities, campus culture won’t change substantially, he said.

“(Inaccessibility) creates an air of tension,” Williams said. “And I’d say 90% of that is because inclusion and accessibility is always the afterthought. It’s like, ‘Hey, we’re gonna order this thing.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, did you check at the front if it was accessible?’ ‘Hey, we’re gonna build this building.’ And it’s like, ‘Well, is it accessible?’ ‘Well, we’ll check.’ As long as inclusion is always the afterthought, if you make inclusion,the last thing that you consider, then this environment of just pervasive, mild tension is what you’re always going to have.” 

Mark Marinoni walks to attend his statistics professor’s office hours the afternoon of Feb. 22. Marinoni thinks sometimes professors and fellow students don’t fully understand his unique needs related to his visual impairment, because he does not look “stereotypically blind,” he said. // Photo by Sarah Komar

UA officials work every day to improve campus accessibility and provision of services to individuals with disabilities, Colbert-Diaz said. Departments across campus making diversity, equity and inclusion a greater priority will only benefit marginalized groups on campus, she said.

“As we see our body grow of individuals with disabilities on this campus, and them be more vocal as well — the wonderful byproduct of that is being able to more readily address things from a firsthand experience perspective,” Colbert-Diaz said. “Yes, we follow the policies, go through those processes, but there’s still the concept of the experience, the lived experience. And so it’s always great to hear from people directly as they’re going through things to make sure the things that we think we’re doing are correct, and the things that we think we’re addressing are really the things that need to be.”

Despite grappling with near-constant feelings of frustration, disappointment and isolation brought on by being visually impaired at the UofA, Marinoni is hopeful about the future. He believes the UofA is not meeting its duty to create an accessible, welcoming environment for all — “It’s pretty much like, ‘education for only the sighted community,’” he told me when we first spoke. But he is committed to fighting for improvements on campus and beyond.

To achieve his long-term goal of affecting change for blind and other disabled individuals, he plans to enter the rehab counseling program after graduating with his B.A. in political science. If and when he does, Marinoni will have beaten the odds — just under 16% of blind and visually impaired American adults have a bachelor’s degree or higher, according to the National Federation of the Blind, compared to about 35% of U.S. adults. That percentage is about the same for adults with a disability in general.

Until then, Marinoni hopes people will educate themselves on what it means to have a disability, consider how inaccessibility can make navigating life a labyrinth for disabled individuals, and try to become allies. “A lot of these freshmen or kids just out of high school, or even transfer students, they don’t understand, and maybe they’ll look at you different or give you some kind of look or something like that, and that doesn’t feel good,” Marinoni said.

He thinks one good way to start is for abled individuals to try and put themselves in other people’s shoes and see — or not see — through their eyes.

“When you’re doing anything that you use your vision for,” Marinoni said, “Try to imagine how you would do that and what it would be like if you couldn’t see.”

**After trying to reach specific people at the CEA several times by phone during the week, a receptionist told me Friday to send their main email a list of questions so whoever is best equipped can answer them. I called today and they said they are working on answering the questions. I will add their responses once I receive them.