This issue is personal. I want to talk about what it is actually like to be partially sighted in an engineering programme.
The background.
At age two, I lost the sight in my right eye after surgery for suspected retinoblastoma, a rare childhood eye cancer. I have been monocular for as long as I can remember. I have a good left eye and a non-functioning right one.
Most of the time I do not think about it. Then I sit down in a lab.
Depth perception and the soldering iron.
Soldering requires judging distance precisely. You need to bring a hot iron tip and a thin wire of solder to the same small point on a PCB simultaneously, without burning an adjacent component or bridging two pads that should not touch.
Binocular vision gives stereo depth cues that tell the brain exactly where objects sit in three-dimensional space. Monocular vision replaces these with learned cues: shadow, relative size and context. These work well in everyday life. They are slower in precision tasks.
When I started soldering I was slower than my peers. Not dramatically, but noticeably. I compensated by using more light, angling the board to improve shadow cues and working more deliberately. Every joint was inspected closely before I moved on.
The result of slowing down was better joints. Rushing produces cold joints. Deliberateness produces clean ones. That discipline is now automatic, not just in soldering but in how I approach code reviews, circuit checks and system tests. It came from a constraint.
The NeoPixel LED cube, which I wrote about in Issue 003, involved 200 solder joints in a three-dimensional frame. Building a jig to hold each LED in position was partly practical necessity and partly an adaptation to working with one eye. The jig did for spatial alignment what binocular vision would have done automatically.
Oscilloscope probes and PCB inspection.
Placing an oscilloscope probe on a specific test point while watching the screen requires spatial judgment about exactly where the probe tip is landing. Standard safety briefings assume you can judge this binocularly. I developed a habit of using physical reference points: placing my finger adjacent to the target pad before bringing the probe in. Slower, but reliable.
PCB inspection is similar. Checking pad alignment, via placement and track routing on a finished board requires careful close-range inspection of small features. I use a magnifier lamp and take extra time at this stage. The outcome is the same as anyone else's inspection but the process is different.
Reading slides and textbooks.
The less visible challenge is not the lab work. It is the daily reading.
Lecture slides are often designed with small fonts, low contrast and cramped layouts. For someone managing contrast sensitivity and visual fatigue in one eye across a full day of study, that adds up across a three-year programme in a way that is hard to explain to someone who has not experienced it.
This is the problem that produced Zaccess. It photographs lecture material, extracts the text using OCR and converts it into high-contrast, large-text notes with text-to-speech support. I built it for myself. That changed how I understood the project. I had solved my own problem and found it solved someone else's. That is the best outcome a tool can have.
What the curriculum gets right and wrong.
Aston's engineering labs are well equipped. The benches have good lighting, the equipment is modern and the technicians are genuinely helpful. Nobody has ever made my monocular vision a formal obstacle.
What the curriculum does not do is acknowledge that depth perception and visual acuity vary between students. Safety briefings assume everyone has two functioning eyes. These are small things individually. Across a three-year programme they accumulate into a consistent pattern of additional effort that most students do not have to manage.
This is not a complaint. It is an observation. Engineering education is designed for a median student. Working around the edge cases makes you better at identifying them.
What the constraint produced.
I genuinely believe working around my vision has made me a more deliberate engineer. I check things twice because I learned to check things twice. I document thoroughly because I cannot rely on visual recall in the same way. I build accessibility into the tools I create because I know what it is like to need it.
If you are navigating engineering with a disability, visible or not: you are not behind. You are building habits of precision and deliberateness that your peers are not being forced to develop. Those habits compound.
Next issue: the books and resources that actually changed how I think.
Zac
