“The first time he got an iPhone and learned how to use VoiceOver, I asked him to show it to me because you just see him tapping the screen and to me it made no sense what he was doing cause it’s just like this flurry of tapping and these words coming out of the phone really really fast,” Lang says. “And when he showed me all the stuff he could do with it, it just blew my mind that he had learned how to interact with it to get all of that out of it. … He’s no different than anybody else. He’s just sitting in the corner over there getting caught up on his phone or listening to music, reading, and sending text messages.”

“It’s amazing how long ago 10 years feels in the world of technology,” says Kevin Waldick, assistant director at the Mission Bay Aquatic Center. “He was not very technologically savvy at all, but when he got his iPhone he was like ‘I can just do it. This is amazing.’ And so Apple does a really amazing job of making that accessible. These sports are accessible just like technology’s accessible. That’s been huge for him.”