A Different Vision

"Many of their solutions were looking outside themselves," she says. "It was looking to the governor and it was looking to the property manager."

"The thing that bothers me about that is that at some point in their life, they had given up some of their personal power," she says. "I don't care what your disability is, your age is, your race is, your economic background is . . . people have a lot to contribute."

This is a classic Republican Party message, true, but it's also something Cox, 37, believes to the core. If you stand up, you will be noticed. If you speak up, you may go farther than anyone ever imagined.

The Onset

She got the diagnosis in sixth grade, but looking back she realized that the signs had begun appearing earlier.

She remembers looking up to the night sky and seeing only darkness in the place where her eyes were focused. But if she looked from a different angle, stars would suddenly appear in the very same place. In the center of her eyes, a blind spot was growing.

Stargardt's is a rare genetic disorder that often shows up in childhood as blurring or loss of central vision. It can take several years for sight to completely disappear, but the loss is inevitable and irreversible. In Cox's case, she still had some fuzzy peripheral vision in high school, but she was legally blind.

To read, she used a machine that magnified the pages of her textbooks. The Utah school district where she lived provided one, but would not let her take it home to use for her homework. Her mother sued the district and lost. So she took out a loan and bought Kristen a $3,000 machine to use at home. When it broke en route to Brazil, where Cox was going to serve an 18-month stint as a Mormon missionary, she realized that she would have to learn to do things differently.

"If I was going to have a life, I was going to have to be my own advocate, to articulate what I needed," she says now. "That wasn't always easy to learn. Sometimes people want to take care of you, make choices for you."

Like when her older sister, Tina Eyring, brought Kristen, then a teenager, along to Italy on a business trip and tried to curtail her activities. Kristen informed her in no uncertain terms that she would explore Rome without any restrictions.

"She really made me mad," says Eyring. "I was her sister, and I wanted to take care of her. It was the only argument I ever had with her, and it was about control. From then on, I just supported her."

Well-meaning friends would read to her, but they would sometimes skip over or paraphrase parts of the texts. As the heavy telescopic glasses she wore stopped working, and the machines could no longer magnify the texts large enough for her to read, she hired readers to help her. She used them throughout her studies at Brigham Young University.

Eight years ago, when her first son was a toddler, Cox enrolled in a Baltimore "boot camp" for the blind, where she learned Braille and honed her ability to navigate with a cane. She likes to say that blindness is not her defining characteristic, merely an inconvenience. This, however, has not kept her sightlessness from becoming a campaign issue.