CaptionMax has a dedicated Consumer Advisory Board with experts in all kinds of accessibility. As guest bloggers, we ask our board members to  share their accessibility stories. Our next CAB guest blogger is Timothy Smitley, a junior at Prior Lake High School in Minnesota. He is new to our board, and we are excited to have the opportunity to get to know him better! Take it away, Timothy.

Hi everyone, my name is Timothy Smitley and this is my first year as a member of the CaptionMax CAB team. I am a junior attending Prior Lake High School and am going on my fifth year of living in Minnesota. I can’t believe that next year I’m going to be a senior and heading off to college.

To tell a little about myself, I was born in California and lived in L.A. for twelve years. I started to become visually impaired when I was diagnosed with eye cancer. After going through all my treatments I was left with almost normal vision in my right eye while my left eye had to be removed. For the next ten years, my vision held stable until about January of my eighth grade year, I woke up one morning and couldn’t see past my nose. My family and I eventually learned that my retina had detached. After a couple surgeries that tried to reattach it, my vision has decreased significantly to a point where I need to use a mobility cane and text-to-speech software to use a computer. But with the aid of some special glasses I can still play Guitar Hero.

Guitar Hero is just one of my interests; others include reading, listening to music, Knowledge Bowl, Judo, and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.  For those of you that don’t know what Knowledge Bowl is, it’s a like playing jeopardy but you’re on a team that has up to five people and there are no categories of questions. The competitions consist of five rounds, one is a written round (scantron test) and the other four are oral. During the oral rounds we use a buzz strip to signal when we know the answer. Once you buzz in you get fifteen seconds to confer with your team before giving your answer. I joined my school’s K.B. team last year thanks to the constant encouragement from my ninth grade geography teacher. This is my second year, and it has been a blast. I’m on the JV team, but chose to bump down to our lowest team because they didn’t have enough people and needed an extra person. Our season has just ended and we took eleventh in state. Next year I’ll be on the varsity team and hopefully a captain as well.

My other main interest is Judo and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I was introduced to Judo through the Northern Plains Vision of Sport Camp up at BSU. Judo is a Japanese martial art that involves standing throws, pins, chokes, and armbars. I was doing Judo a little over a year until my class was canceled due to financial issues at the gym. Before I had to stop, I was at an orange belt and about ready to test for a green belt. This would have put me four belts away from a black belt. I have participated in one tournament, but lost because the rules had been changed to favor people who knew Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. I’ve started Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu a few weeks ago because of my interest in martial arts, it’s based heavily in mat work, and I didn’t like losing in that tournament. So far it has been fun but hard because the rest of the class has been doing it for at least six months and they are mostly between the ages of twenty and thirty. Despite all that, I still do my best and I am able to hold my own.

I hope you have enjoyed this little window into my life and I’m looking forward to writing more posts.