My name is Kevin Leong. I am a visually impaired avid traveler, artist, ceramicist, programmer, and Guide dog user.
I love to travel all over the world. I have been to 6 of the 7 contents. I have spent more time travelling internationally but enjoy travelling within the US as well. I have traveeled to Alaska, Washington DC, Virginia, Boston, New York, Florida, New Orleans, LA, Seattle, and Hawaii in the US. Internationally I have travelled to
I enjoy using many different art mediums. I love to work with alcohol markers, watercolors, watercolor pencils, colored pencils, and most of all ceramics.
MY STORY
I am visually impaired, I had a brain injury when I was six and because I was so young and my brain hadn’t fully developed my neurological brain processing was impacted. I was in the ICU for 2 weeks and in intensive care for over a month. I had to relearn to walk and school has always been a struggle. Many of my teachers didn’t want to support or understand my visual brain processing impairment.
I had a really frustrating time in middle school. My 7th grade science teacher hated boys, she is divorced, has one daughter, and her daughter went to Castilleja, an all girls private school. She refused to give me enlarged print and when my aid went to enlarge it for me it would take 15 minutes at the beginning of each class. She claimed it was because she was so “dynamic”. She would say, “I’m so dynamic I don’t know what I am going to be teaching until that period.”
In eighth grade, I had an issue in PE. It was coed soccer and no shin guards, so what would I do? I would accidentally kick people in the shins because I have bad depth perception and fast moving objects are hard for me to process. We had an IEP (individual education plan) meeting and both my vision specialist and the adaptive PE specialist recommended that “Since he can’t see well enough to play… Why doesn’t he be referee?” My parents and I were pissed. How the F am I going to be referee when I can’t even see the ball well enough to play.
How is my vision now?
I am “consistently inconsistent.” Meaning depending on day to day and what time it is my vision (or rather what I see) changes. The easiest way to explain it is I have a battery life and at the end of the day depending on what I have been doing that day it might be drained. When my “battery” is drained I don’t always see things on my right side and I tilt my head slightly to the right so that I can see what I am reading easier.
It is not really a vision issue. It is is a visually BRAIN processing impairment. I have a cortical vision impairment. It is not what my eyes see that is the issue. The part that was damaged is the connection between what my eyes see and how my brain interprets or “process” the information that was impacted.
I have binasal blockage meaning I don’t see things that are right in front of me like where my nose is. I have no depth perception or peripheral vision. Contrast and fast moving objects are very difficult for me. It takes me longer to process what I am seeing.
I have a “lazy eye” meaning that unless I close my left eye, my right eye won’t focus. I have a limited field of vision especially on my right side. When I get tired I will miss things on my right side. I will cut too close to corners of things on my right side and if I am reading may miss things that are on the right hand side of the page or line. I am not color blind but contrast is difficult for me so both the colors are pretty dark may be tricky for me to distinguish the different colors.