Melanie has been a contract instructor at Carleton University since 2013, teaching philosophy and religion. Earlier this year, she graduated from McGill University with a PhD.

“While I was working, I underwent a severe progression of an inborn muscle disorder,” she explains, noting that it impacts her mobility and eyesight. “I found myself faced with a host of new obstacles, just to continue doing what I loved – teaching and researching and academic service.”

Muscle disorders can make work on the computer difficult, and while she had gathered some assistive technology to help, she wanted to learn to use it more effectively.

“[Academia is] an extremely competitive field, and here I was just spending so much time just doing basic tasks,” she says. “I thought there have to be more efficient ways for me to do the things that I’m doing.

“What people don’t realize is that just because you become disabled, doesn’t mean you know how to be disabled.”

Melanie learned about Neil Squire’s Distance Computer Comfort program from the Ottawa Independent Living Resource Centre and decided to give it a try.

She started lessons with her tutor, Khatidja, and learned keyboard shortcuts that greatly reduced the amount of time she was spending on tasks. While her assistive mouse makes using the computer much more comfortable, it also moves quite slow – these shortcuts allow her to use her keyboard to access files and navigate her computer much more easily.

“I have a PhD, I know how to learn stuff, but when I would have just a long list of shortcuts, I wouldn’t know: what’s going to be really useful here?” she says. “So what was amazing is I told Khatidja what I had to do, and she would just come up with these super-efficient ways of doing it.

“Thanks to everything I learned, I save minimum an hour every day,” she continues. “I’d say some days as much as three hours.”

She also learned how to better use her learning content management system that creates the online course materials her students access, learning how to navigate it supported by her screen reader and accessing easy-to-use templates to create her course sites.

“It was just having someone supporting you in such a specific, caring [way], just coming from such a knowledgeable place. Very, very helpful,” Melanie says.

“It’s really reduced the strain and made me feel more confident that I can do everything that I need to do to stay viable in my industry.”

With a greater focus on online learning with the COVID-19 pandemic, computer skills and comfort have become even more important in Melanie’s field.

“In my experience, there have been great things about becoming disabled — I’ve learned so much. What has been hardest for me is that I really, really love my job, and it’s difficult to stay competitive when I face so many obstacles, so I’m just really grateful that there are programs like this out there.”