"To my horror, I couldn't make out a single word on the display. The customer, a woman with her young daughter, stood impatiently as I froze. I didn't know what to say. After a few awkward minutes, the hiring manager dismissed me and I received a rejection email the next morning. My dreams of attending Wireless and Reading festivals with my friends disintegrated and I had another, more important, revelation: for the first time in my life, I realised that I was disabled."
"I knew I had been born partially sighted due to complications in the womb. As a child, I remember struggling to see the whiteboard in class, even when I was sitting right at the front. I masked this by copying notes from my friends, face bent close to the paper. To this day I struggle with basic maths, having learned most of it second hand."
"I remember the nerves I felt on the way there. What would they ask me? Would they like me? In the end, I had nothing to worry about. The interview went well and the hiring manager seemed ready to hand me a contract. But, before I left, he asked me to try out serving a customer. Just give her the items shown next to her order number on that screen, he said, pointing to a monitor on the wall behind him."
A 16-year-old seeking summer work sent brief CVs to local shops and secured an interview at a fast-food restaurant. The interview proceeded well until a required task involved reading a monitor display, which the young person could not make out and froze. The candidate was dismissed and later rejected, ending plans for music festivals and prompting a realization of disability. The individual had been born partially sighted due to prenatal complications, struggled to see classroom materials, copied peers' notes, and learned basic maths second-hand. Adults discussed vision concerns privately and frequent ophthalmology appointments felt routine.
Read at www.theguardian.com
Unable to calculate read time
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