Features Reporter
Meet Ty Littlefield. Now a sophomore at CMU, he carves wood, programs computers and designs games. He has never seen a human face, yet has more vision than the average human. He’s never driven a car, but he is very much a driven man. He may never go to the moon, but nothing has stopped him yet. He lives simple dorm life, seeking a good time, while simultaneously pushing the limits of the impossible and extraordinary.
“Ninety percent of blind people don’t work,” Littlefield said. “I think my motivation was that I didn’t want to be one of them sitting at home doing nothing all day every day.”
Littlefield’s optic nerves did not develop correctly, rendering him blind from birth. He only sees change between light and darkness.
“In grade school, my parents taught me to keep my head up,” Littlefield said. “It was hard, and I wasn’t able to do it until more recently.”
In middle school and high school, he admits his grades weren’t spectacular, but he knew that he didn’t want to be stuck. Depending totally on the government was Littlefield’s greatest fear.
“I could not go to college,” Littlefield said. “But if I do that, then I’m just going to be right where [the unemployed] are.”
Littlefield believes that self-pity is rampant in the lives of many in the blind community, hindering them from engaging in the workforce, but he has another perspective.
“If you’re raised and you’re sheltered and everything is done for you, then you’re not going to go and do anything,” Littlefield said. “Self-pity has a lot to do with motivation, whether your blind or not.”
Littlefield admits there are unexpected challenges to being visually impaired.
“I think getting class assignments has been one of the hardest things,” Littlefield said. “But a lot of the time, it’s more the people. People aren’t really comfortable with asking questions and talking to me.”
The sophomore says no shortage of students are willing to pet O’Malley, Littlefield’s seeing-eye dog. The golden retriever leads Littlefield on various routes that the pair have learned around campus, from class to class, dorm to cafeteria and wherever else Littlefield needs to be.
“One of the hardest things is getting people to not pet him,” Littlefield said. “If he’s working and standing up and you pet him, then he’s going to not want to work. He’ll just want to be petted more.”
During freshman registration, he faced a wall of discouragement from others.
“I think one of the things that really caught me off guard is when a guy made a comment in my first semester here,” Littlefield said. “The guy told me that ‘any blind student that has taken more than 12 credit hours at CMU has failed horribly.’”
Littlefield took 17 credit hours and received A’s and B’s.
Earlier this year, he heard someone say “blind people can’t carve wood,” so he began carving.
“I’m just getting into it. I tried some stick figures, but those are pretty hard. There’s a lot of symmetry to them,” Littlefield said.
But his creativity doesn’t stop there. The sophomore plans to major in computer science with a minor in math. Currently, Littlefield designs online games, but he wants to use his degree to do computer testing for large corporations.
“There’s a program on the computer that reads the screen. I can go to any computer and put that on there and use it,” Littlefield said.
Littlefield faces a challenging road ahead, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.
“I don’t understand how someone could have the opportunity to go somewhere and do something, something more than what they are, and not take it,” Littlefield said. “That’s why when people say I can’t do something, then I do it.”
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