Olivia Durant
Women born blind who later gained eyesight
Olivia Durant (formerly known as Karrie Mentzer and Oni Hartstein) is an American activist originally from Pittsburgh, who came to national prominence from being legally blind at birth, then regaining eyesight in 2016 after a surgical procedure at The Eye Center of New York. Durant has been featured on Good Morning America and also been the subject of numerous articles including BuzzFeed and The Insider.
Early years
Olivia Durant has described a visit to an eye doctor when she was a child. According to Durant, the doctor diagnosed her eyes as "weak" and dubbed her legally blind, which is defined as vision worse than 20/200.
Durant was prescribed glasses with two inch thick concave lenses, then corrective contact lenses at age nine that provided a small amount of peripheral vision, albeit blurred. She's described difficulty visually recognizing people and told a story about becoming separated from her grandmother in a department store, then mistakenly running into the arms of a stranger. Incidents like this made Durant wary and scared through much of her childhood.
With effort and strategically positioned lighting sources, Durant has recounted being able to laboriously read books. She also used memorization and other mental methods to navigate her surroundings without assistance. During her interviews, Durant has also discussed being ostracized and bullied by other children growing up.
The public source identifies “Olivia Durant” as women born blind who later gained eyesight. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Olivia, Durant and Women.
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This entry incorporates text from “Olivia Durant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.