Growing up in rural Oregon, Erin Lauridsen didn’t have a lot of contact with blind people like herself. She recalls there being one other blind person in her town, but they were much older and, unlike Lauridsen, had lost their vision later in life. So when her family got dial-up internet during her high school years in the late ‘90s, she said the first thing she did was find other blind students online, people she could relate to who were already out in the world living their lives. She read their stories. She got to know them.
“The World Wide Web’s first role for me was connecting with community and kind of helping me figure out how I was going to get out in the broader world,” she told Gizmodo.
Lauridsen said she joined a listserv for blind students who would send around 50 emails back and forth each day. These messages would discuss everything from “textbooks to guide dogs to dating.”
