How US Policy Looks Set to Screw Over the Blind

In law school in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Thomas Alieu was smart, determined, and thwarted. “I wanted to become the first blind lawyer in this country,” says Alieu, who was blinded by the measles when he was 5. He’d survived the country’s decade-long civil war and thrived at university — he earned a bachelor’s degree in history — but when he got to law school, he couldn’t find recordings of his specialized textbooks, and the classmates who had read aloud to him as an undergraduate were too busy to do the same in law school. “I was forced to be a dropout because the materials were not there.”