Hi, my name is markitorowlando!

Hi there, my name is Mark Rowland and I’m 42 years old. I would first like to tell you a little about myself and my disability. I have a rare form of cerebral palsy (CP) known as “athetoid”. This affects 10% of people diagnosed with CP. This means that my muscles are affected in a way that causes involuntary motions/movements. I have trouble holding an upright position when seated, I am unable to stand up. I am also unable to hold any objects, have some difficulty when eating and drinking and have non verbal communication.

However, I am not your typical person with this type of impairment by far. Because I got a tendency to have a really good life of nefarious debauchery and illicit shenanigans. Therefore, I am an easy person to get along with who likes to have a laugh and giggle. I think that I can hold a quite good and intelligent conversation and have an amazing sense of humor! Despite not being able to verbally communicate I can however communicate in a variety of other ways. One example of my communication is via a communication aid that I am able to take everywhere with me. This aid works with eye gaze technology and therefore picks up my eye movements to spell out words and sentences. I am also able to access windows on this aid and other social networking pages such as Facebook and Skype. I also have an amazing iMac with a foot controlled mouse that I use very well to navigate around the internet and various software that I use such as Ableton Live which is a music producing software. Finally I have an alternative manual way of communicating with my PA’s for when my technology isn’t around which you will get to know once you spend time with me. 

As you may have noticed above that I use music software, well this is a very big part of my life as I have gained a 2:1 BA honours degree in Music Production and have gone on to work with some amazing musicians such as DJ Fresh on a project funded by Smirnoff down in London with 2 other disabled people. This project is called Mindtunes and is basically the 3 of us creating a music track solely from our brainwaves. This is very exciting technology and we had great success with over a million hits on YouTube. Here is a link of me involved with the Mindtunes project. In this link you will get to see me at home and our project.

http://youtu.be/tnCdoEjLQQw