Student Voices - Jóhanna Birna Bjartmarsdóttir
From 2010 to 2020, Jóhanna Birna Bjartmarsdóttir lived with chronic pain every single day. Jóhanna also has autism, ADHD, and severe dyslexia, three compounding challenges that made her school years painful and frustrating.
Fast forward to today,and Jóhanna is not only studying Education Science and Health Promotion at the University of Florida, but also leading her own accessibility consultancy - HARTS. Learn how Jóhanna beat the odds, and is helping others to do the same.
From twenty ten to twenty twenty, I dealt with chronic pain every single day. And at sixteen years old, I had lost all of my friend's abilities, was immobile in a wheelchair, and had no hope or ever leading a normal life again. My name is Johanna Perta Permestosic, and I'm studying education science and health promotion at the University of Florida. I was a really an untraditional student, and I have autism, ADHD, and severe dyslexia, so I hated school growing up. I used to just be really into sports, and I was quite good at them, so people weren't worried. And teachers didn't even want to, like, help me because they were just like, why bother? It's not like you're gonna go into academia or anything like that.
But then I got really sick. I was immobile in a wheelchair. It was a really long process, but I kind of miraculously recovered. Because I had been sick, I had not gone to which is a school in Icelandic education which is eleven to thirteenth grade. And this is a degree you need in order to go to university.
And I really wanted to go to university and study health education but I was told that that wasn't possible. I needed this in order to do that. Every single person told me that I would not be able to do this and that this was impossible. But at one Thanksgiving dinner in twenty nineteen, a person from the University of Florida was there at the dinner and I was telling her about my passion for health education. And she told me that UF had an online degree.
And I'd never heard about that sort of program, those jobs or UF online. So I set my sights on the University of Florida. It took me a long time. It took me two years. I'm going into my fourth year at the University of Florida now.
The first thing I always do is log in to the Canvas calendar and see what assignments I have. The thing about the online environment is that I can control it. How long I'd take to do them, the lighting, the brightness, the smell, the temperature, I can control everything within the surrounding environment. If I'm quite overstimulated or tired, I need to be in a quiet environment and then I would go home to meet my needs that given day. And as someone who's autistic, this is really important for me to be able to make those judgments calls every day so I can do really well in a demanding academic program.
Canvas is really useful and helpful for, like, in person students, but for me as an online student, it is the entire learning environment. Features within Canvas that help support my accessibility needs are design tools and formatting that is accessible to text to speech software, which I rely on a lot. Providing lectures and a transcript of the videos really helps me have an equitable learning opportunity. When instructors use appropriate colors and color contrast and to visually chunk the information, that's super helpful for me at least and I know it is for other students. It makes me be able to, like, enjoy learning.
It makes me able to focus on the learning part when it's used to its full potential. Canvas is great. The potential with AI to bring more equitable educational opportunities to diverse students is just unmatched. You're giving them an equitable opportunity to really reflect that competence and knowledge by providing them with a grammar software. This is becoming a part of our reality and so we need to integrate it just like we did with a calculator.
The value of Canvas is so much. It has a potential to really increase the quality of the learning environment for all of your learners not just students with disabilities. This can be attributed to the curb cut effect which is a phenomenon that when you change the environment to make it accessible for one group, it increases the quality of the environment for everybody. By not using Canvas, institutions are creating a systematic barrier for students like me. So I think it is really important because it also supports diversity and innovation.
I also started a company at twenty one years old. It's a tech company called Hearts that helps institutions and educators offer accessible learning environments for their students. I just wanna be kind of the role model that I never had and show that students with learning disabilities do belong and can excel in higher academia. I'm just always filled with so much gratitude that I'm not only healthy, but I get to do what I love and help people like me also. And that just I feel like nothing beats that.
But then I got really sick. I was immobile in a wheelchair. It was a really long process, but I kind of miraculously recovered. Because I had been sick, I had not gone to which is a school in Icelandic education which is eleven to thirteenth grade. And this is a degree you need in order to go to university.
And I really wanted to go to university and study health education but I was told that that wasn't possible. I needed this in order to do that. Every single person told me that I would not be able to do this and that this was impossible. But at one Thanksgiving dinner in twenty nineteen, a person from the University of Florida was there at the dinner and I was telling her about my passion for health education. And she told me that UF had an online degree.
And I'd never heard about that sort of program, those jobs or UF online. So I set my sights on the University of Florida. It took me a long time. It took me two years. I'm going into my fourth year at the University of Florida now.
The first thing I always do is log in to the Canvas calendar and see what assignments I have. The thing about the online environment is that I can control it. How long I'd take to do them, the lighting, the brightness, the smell, the temperature, I can control everything within the surrounding environment. If I'm quite overstimulated or tired, I need to be in a quiet environment and then I would go home to meet my needs that given day. And as someone who's autistic, this is really important for me to be able to make those judgments calls every day so I can do really well in a demanding academic program.
Canvas is really useful and helpful for, like, in person students, but for me as an online student, it is the entire learning environment. Features within Canvas that help support my accessibility needs are design tools and formatting that is accessible to text to speech software, which I rely on a lot. Providing lectures and a transcript of the videos really helps me have an equitable learning opportunity. When instructors use appropriate colors and color contrast and to visually chunk the information, that's super helpful for me at least and I know it is for other students. It makes me be able to, like, enjoy learning.
It makes me able to focus on the learning part when it's used to its full potential. Canvas is great. The potential with AI to bring more equitable educational opportunities to diverse students is just unmatched. You're giving them an equitable opportunity to really reflect that competence and knowledge by providing them with a grammar software. This is becoming a part of our reality and so we need to integrate it just like we did with a calculator.
The value of Canvas is so much. It has a potential to really increase the quality of the learning environment for all of your learners not just students with disabilities. This can be attributed to the curb cut effect which is a phenomenon that when you change the environment to make it accessible for one group, it increases the quality of the environment for everybody. By not using Canvas, institutions are creating a systematic barrier for students like me. So I think it is really important because it also supports diversity and innovation.
I also started a company at twenty one years old. It's a tech company called Hearts that helps institutions and educators offer accessible learning environments for their students. I just wanna be kind of the role model that I never had and show that students with learning disabilities do belong and can excel in higher academia. I'm just always filled with so much gratitude that I'm not only healthy, but I get to do what I love and help people like me also. And that just I feel like nothing beats that.
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