“They didn’t think it would be possible for me to finish a degree,” says UP PhD student Zak Claassen, who put to rest any doubts of his success as a blind student, having obtained multiple degrees cum laude.

The most distinctive quality about Zak Claassen is that he is a remarkable academic.  He achieved seven distinctions in matric and is doing his PhD at the University of Pretoria (UP), where he graduated with undergraduate, honours and master’s degrees, all cum laude.

He is the type of high flier that schools and universities like to brag about, and to add to their scorecards of illustrious graduates. So it is to Claassen’s credit that he’s achieved this stand-out academic record in a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) subject, even though he had minimal sight at birth and by the age of 13 was completely blind. His STEM discipline is bioinformatics, which combines computer science with biology or, more specifically, integrates mathematical, computer, statistical and biological sciences to analyse biological data.

Although STEM is not inaccessible to blind or low-vision students, internationally, the number of visually impaired science candidates is not high. It has also been documented that those who do STEM tend not to do well because the subjects are very visual. Furthermore, in South Africa, being accepted for such a course can take some persuasion.

In fact, Claassen is the subject of a UP academic research paper by Dr Rethabile Tekane and Professor Marietjie Potgieter. Partially funded by the Department of Higher Education and Training, with additional support from a UP Scholarship of Teaching and Learning grant, it was published in the South African Journal of Science in 2021. Titled ‘Insights from training a blind student in biological sciences’, it is identified as the first such study in the South African context.

Claassen acknowledges that his success “depended a lot on the people that helped me, especially in undergrad. Unfortunately, a lot of the stuff was visual, which I suppose is why some people were reluctant to let me take their modules”.

There is no doubt UP played a role in Claassen’s success. The University provided tutors to explain visual concepts to him, in addition to the usual teaching programme as well as during exams, especially during his undergraduate studies.

UP also helped him to access electronic copies of textbooks and adapt them so they could be read by screen readers (software programmes that convert text to speech). Screen readers can be installed on laptops and cellphones. But its weakness is that it deals only with text and does not describe images. Also, sometimes documents are actually photographic copies or images rather than text, and need to be formatted via optical character recognition (OCR) to be suitable for screen readers.

“The support of the disability unit was critical; I don’t think I would have managed if it didn’t exist,” says Claassen. “UP has one of the better disability units, based on some of the experiences I've heard from people attending other universities, such as not getting study material scanned in and ‘OCR-ed’ until after the first semester tests.”

Claassen’s university experience is tightly bound to the unit – now known as ADIS, the Access, Disability and Inclusion Service – having made contact with it before he applied to UP.

“We went to talk to them for the first time when I was in Grade 11, to get the process started of finding out how it worked and what I could do. I broadly knew I wanted to do something scientific, but I didn't really know exactly what.”

Juan Erwee of the unit arranged meetings with different heads of departments, and the pivotal moment was when they got in touch with the then Deputy Dean of the Natural and Agricultural Sciences Faculty, Prof Potgieter, who subsequently contributed to the research project about Claassen. She was “supportive and we started making more progress”, Claassen says.

“Most people – and by ‘people’, I mean departments – were not willing to take me. They were reluctant and didn’t think it would be possible for me to finish a degree.”

Mathematics and statistics were an option but not an interest, and he ended up with two supportive departments: genetics and physics. He chose genetics because he was more interested in biology, and says Prof Paulette Bloomer, then head of what used to be a separate department of genetics, “also played a big role in getting me in”.

Claassen’s success has been a long process. It took him five years to get his undergraduate degree in BSc (Human Genetics). This followed a pre-arranged decision to spread the first academic year into two calendar years “to allow for adjustment, refinement of procedures and exposure to a wide range of disciplines”, say Dr Tekane and Prof Potgieter in their journal article. 

He clearly adjusted well: he completed the final year of his undergraduate degree in one year, did honours in one year, and his master’s – about antibiotic resistance – in three.

Now, at 30 years old, his main focus is on getting a PhD, which is on African gut microbiomes. He is studying South African samples and his main supervisor, Prof Thulani Makhalanyane – who transferred to Stellenbosch University but who has been contracted to UP as an extraordinary (part-time) professor since August – was involved in collecting those sample. Prof Makhalanyane has described Claassen as “highly driven and methodologically rigorous”, and an “amazing communicator” with whom “you can never have a conversation without sharing a few laughs”. Dr Rian Pierneef was Claassen’s co-supervisor for his master’s and was the one who helped him with the visual representation of his results. Dr Oliver Mogase Bezuidt is co-supervising his PhD.

Claassen does not aim to become a lecturer, at least “not at the moment” he says. He does work part-time as an assistant lecturer for Academic Information Management, teaching visually impaired first-years how to use screen readers.

“It is basically a computer literacy course, covering things like Word, Excel and PowerPoint. The way you interact with a computer using a screen reader is very different because you don't use the mouse at all, and everything involves keyboard shortcuts. I mostly teach the completely blind because if someone has some visual impairment they can generally get by with a magnifier, which allows them to do things normally, as long as it's enlarged on the screen.”

Claassen’s achievements are sadly those of an outlier. “His success cannot be interpreted as evidence that our measures to accommodate him would be sufficient to ensure the success of other students with BLV (blind or low vision),” write Dr Tekane and Prof Potgieter. “Being exceptionally gifted, both mentally and emotionally, should not be a prerequisite for a blind person to succeed in STEM education. The South African education system must urgently address the broad pattern of social exclusion of BLV students that has been prevalent until now. This success story represents a small step towards the goal of greater equity in STEM education.”

Meanwhile Claassen is upbeat and continues to be motivated. When not hard at work, he is an active observer rather than contributor on X, formerly Twitter, where he also follows a lot of scientific people.

“You see a lot of articles or interesting things that you would have otherwise missed,” he says.

And his academic career is not the only thing that blossomed at what was then UP’s disability unit. Ten years ago, it was where he reconnected with Reinette Taljaard, who he knew from the Prinshof School for the Visually Impaired. She is now an advocate, and she and Claassen are still romantically involved.