BY LUISA D’AMATO, RECORD STAFF

KITCHENER — Ashley Welford-Costelloe is completely blind — and she is living proof that if you’re
determined to do something, almost nothing can stop you.

Welford-Costelloe is studying to be a journalist at Conestoga College. Part of the requirement of that

program is a photography class.

So she’s taking the class, and she’s doing well.

“It’s not as hard as I thought it would be,” says Welford-Costelloe, 23. “All I need help with is how to
hold the camera. I just need someone to show me where to point the camera.”

She has an aide for that, provided by the college. The aide acts as Welford-Costelloe’s eyes, by telling
her where the subject is in the frame. Then Welford-Costelloe pushes the button to shoot the picture.

“She’s a joy,” says teacher Dave Chidley.

He admits that when he first heard he had a blind student in his class, “it did mess with my head a
little bit.

“My first impression was: ‘Wow! How do I deal with this?’ ”

He still wonders how someone who doesn’t know what shadows look like can comprehend a subject
that is all about light.

But he hadn’t counted on Welford-Costelloe’s determination and intellect.

She comes to every class, listens to the lectures, and understands most of the concepts, he said.

When she’s taking pictures, she can get lots of her information from verbal clues.

Welford-Costelloe says it’s harder to take pictures of things like flowers than it is to take photos of
people. People can talk, and then she can point the camera with ease.

She has been blind since she was 13 months old, when she lost her vision to a type of eye cancer
called retinoblastoma. She required surgery that left her with no sight at all. Her eyes are made of
glass.

As a teenager, she went to W. Ross Macdonald School for the Blind in Brantford. She took a bus from
her home in Oakville every day. But she didn’t like the place. She felt too sheltered.

“When I was younger, a lot of people didn’t see past my blindness,” she said.

And that has been harder to deal with than any photography class, she said.
“I’ve had people come up and yell at me, like they were talking to someone who’s deaf.”

Or “they grab me by the shirt and they just pull me around. It’s really annoying. I don’t like being
grabbed.”

In fact, Welford-Costelloe gets around with ease and delicacy, feeling with her fingers for the switch
she’s looking for on a wall, walking briskly down a hallway with her stick tapping in front of her to
make sure the way in front of her is clear. She doesn’t have a guide dog.

She lives in a student residence across a busy intersection from the college. She doesn’t feel safe
navigating it by herself. She either asks someone else to go with her, or she takes the bus to school.

She took journalism because she loves writing. And she enjoys her classmates in the program. “They
all have their quirks,” she said.

“They’re just really interesting, and there are some people who are really opinionated and aren’t afraid
to say what they want.”

Welford-Costelloe has one more year of school and then hopes to get a job at a newspaper, covering
“hard news” like police reports, courts and other local news.

She knows jobs at newspapers are hard to get. “It’s going to be difficult,” she said.

But “I will find one. I just know.”

"You just deal with it:" Blind college student pursues

career in theater
Featured Business »

Tiffany Taylor first got bitten by the theater bug as a high school student in her hometown of Livonia
when she auditioned for the school’s very selective Creative and Performing Arts program, got accepted,
and started performing as well as taking acting classes and private voice lessons.

And so, when it came time to think about college, it was only natural that she’d want to pursue theater as a
potential career. Because some people from her high school had gone on to Adrian College, that became
her choice.

“I knew they had a really good theater program, and I liked being able to go to a small school,” she said.
And she also knew she’d be able to get involved in theater there much more easily than at a larger college.

Pursuing a degree in theater would be tough enough for plenty of students. For Taylor, there’s an
additional challenge: she’s been legally blind since birth.
Though her blindness may make some aspects of being in theater more of a challenge than it would be for
a sighted student, it doesn’t deter her from her goals. “You just work with it,” she said. “I can’t change the
facts.”

And to the theater department faculty, the 19-year-old sophomore has already proven herself. “She knows
her lines faster than any other student,” theater professor Michael Allen said with a laugh.

“A lot of times, I’m trying to keep up with her,” said Annissa Morgensen-Lindsay, assistant professor of
theater and Taylor’s advisor.

Morgensen-Lindsay even thinks she’s learned something herself by working with her student.
“It is a challenge, but in a good way” to do theater work with Taylor, she said. “It really makes you think.
Theater is such a visual thing. You really have to be able to explain what you’re seeing (to her).”

It didn’t take long after Taylor got to Adrian College for her to find out that, just as she’d hoped, she could
quickly get immersed in theater. In fact, she hadn’t been on campus long at all before she won the lead in
“Alone,” a student-written, one-act play.

“It was the biggest part I’ve had, acting-wise. … And being a freshman and getting cast was really great,”
she said.

In her freshman year, she was even nominated for an American College Theatre Festival acting award and
attended the regional event, with other Adrian College theater students, at Saginaw Valley State
University. Besides taking part in the competition, “I got to see a lot of different shows and workshops,
which was really fun,” she said.

And this past May, she had an acting experience of a very different kind. She was an extra in the upcoming
Hilary Swank movie “Betty Anne Waters,” for which a scene was filmed at the University of Michigan’s
Ann Arbor campus.

“We played law students,” she said. “We got to sit in a classroom and watch Hilary Swank. It was fun to be
on an actual movie set.”

Does she ever think about trying to make it in the movies herself? Not really, she said: “I like the stage
better. It’s live, there are people watching you, the scenes are all in order” — as opposed to when a movie
is filmed — “and you get the feedback from the audience,” she said.

 Taylor does her work, both in theater and in her other classes, with the help of a number of technologies
provided by the college’s Academic Services department. For example, she uses audio textbooks, a
computer with a speech program that allows her to hear text read, a magnifier to enlarge pages — she does
have very limited sight in one eye — and a Braille embosser.

She prepares for her roles, like the one she’ll have in the department’s upcoming production of
Shakespeare’s “The Comedy of Errors” Dec. 3-5, by scanning her scripts into her computer, which then
reads her lines and the lines of the other actors aloud. And recently, she stage-managed a show using a
script the embosser transformed into Braille for her, allowing her to run lines with the cast and give cues
as she followed along in the script during the production.

“That was a good experience,” she said.

She’s also gained some other technical experience already in her college theatrical career, including
serving as the light board operator — “which is pretty funny, actually” — she said, laughing.

As with Adrian College’s other theater students, “it’s about putting her in positions where she can learn as
much as possible,” said Morgensen-Lindsay. Coming up for her, in fact, are classes in directing and in
technical and design work.

But Taylor considers herself primarily an actor. Her high school theatrical resume includes “High School
Musical,” “Sweet Charity” and “The Wizard of Oz,” but even though she’s a singer too — and sings in the
Adrian College Choir — she actually prefers straight plays to musicals.

“They’re more realistic,” she said. After all, in real life, “you’re not going to start singing randomly. And (in
a straight play) I don’t have to deal with dance.”

Only rarely does Taylor’s blindness pose any real issues onstage. “Once I had to make an exit and I sort of
missed,” she said. “But it wasn’t a huge deal. If something happens, we just have to work around it.”

Occasionally, some adjustments do have to be made in shows to accommodate her, like the scene in the
one-act in which her character was talking to a person writing on a chalkboard. In the script, the other
character is supposed to tell her to look at the chalkboard, and so of course the line had to be changed.

“For the most part, (an audience member) wouldn’t notice the changes,” she said.

And Allen believes that Taylor’s blindness isn’t even all that obvious to many theatergoers. “I’m not sure
that when she played her first big role, people even realized she had a sight problem,” he said.

Taylor even thinks that in some ways her blindness helps her as an actress. “I think it gives a different
dimension to my character,” she said.

Is there a role that she really wants to play someday?

“I think it’d be cool doing ‘Wait Until Dark,’ ” she said. In that play, a blind woman is terrorized by three
thugs who are looking for something in her apartment. In the end, the woman uses her blindness to her
advantage, outwitting the men by holding out until darkness falls, at which point she has the upper hand
because they can’t see.

After her Adrian College years are over, Taylor — who’s also active as an Alpha Sigma Alpha sorority sister
and is looking forward to the college choir’s upcoming concert at Carnegie Hall as well as to her visit to
Scotland next year — wants to go to graduate school, but possibly to pursue a different kind of career than
theater. Along with her theater major, she’s minoring in psychology.

“I want to have a job, so if theater doesn’t work out I want to have a backup,” she said.

Allen said that while it’s impossible to predict who will make it professionally in the dramatic arts —
“theater is a tough road for anyone,” he said — “Tiffany is very talented. Certainly she has more challenges
in theater than other folks, but she has desire and intelligence and talent.”

And even if she ends up doing something different with her life than theater, Taylor said she wants to get
as much out of her college-theater experience as possible.

“I really want to learn as much as I can,” she said, “in case I don’t get to do it as much later on.”