Corrected version: Story updated at 9:53 a.m. on Monday, June 1, 2015 to show the correct spelling of Taylor Adolph’s last name.

Taylor Adolph doesn’t get much stage fright. It’s hard to fear an audience, he said, when you can’t see it.

So, he’s not much worried about speaking Thursday at the Rogers High School graduation. Taylor is the school’s valedictorian. As far as anyone at the school knows, he’s also the first blind TPS student to graduate at the top of his class.

The 18-year-old said he never gave much thought to his class ranking, learning only recently from the salutatorian that the pair have swapped the top spots numerous times while in high school. Now, armed with a 4.2 grade-point average and headed to Eastern Michigan University this fall, Taylor thinks the valedictorian title is a validation of a personal credo, that blindness might create obstacles, but is not a handicap.

“Disabled is a misnomer,” he said. “It’s only a disability if the person believes it’s a disability.”

Taylor was not born blind. He has hydrocephaly, which causes fluid buildup in the brain.

He had shunts installed to mitigate the buildup, but the shunts can fail, and his optic nerve was damaged because of a failed shunt.

He didn’t wake up blind. Instead, he suffered a gradual loss of vision when he was 8, which was noticed when he started failing math tests. Adults realized he was skipping questions because he didn’t see them.

Now, he has no sight in his left eye, and can only see large objects from a distance with his right.

There are schools for the blind, but Taylor wanted to remain mainstreamed. He chafed at the idea that blind people can’t learn as fast as their sighted peers. And he thought other kids his age who were visually impaired were being held back by lowered expectations.

So, he stayed in traditional classrooms, and has flourished. He’s been near the top of his class for years.

Robyn Marrufo, the district’s Braillist, has worked with Taylor since he lost his sight. She remembers that he told staff he didn’t care what he had to do, he just wanted to learn to read. Taylor learned two years of Braille in eight months, he said, determined to not let sight determine his future.

There were difficulties. Braille books are very large, making them awkward to transport. Some subjects are more difficult than others. The worst grade he got in recent years was a D in chemistry, a visual subject made harder by communication issues with his teacher.

Foreign languages present a complication. Taylor took a Russian class, and Ms. Marrufo and Fatima Shousher, a special education intervention specialist who is also visually impaired, struggled to find Cyrillic Braille books.

He doesn’t hide from these things, and he doesn’t mind talking to others about being blind. He’d rather kids ask him questions than talk behind his back. “If you don’t ask, you don’t get anywhere,” he said.

His whole perspective on life changed when he went blind. Gone are many fears, he said, “Why be afraid of spiders when he can’t see them? If they bite, they bite. It’ll be too late to do much, anyway.”

Judgment of others too has become a curious concept to him. Racism and other forms of discrimination are diseases of people who can see, he said. Sight leads to judgment. He lost his ability, or desire, to make surface-level judgments of others.

He hopes, he said, that being valedictorian will help his peers and others lose any surface-level judgment they might have of the blind. It’ll help that friend Nick Smella, who is also visually impaired, is ranked fourth in the senior class. Neither has obsessed about grades, Nick said.

“We just do what we do,” he said.

A teen with a vivid imagination, Taylor plans to study creative writing and psychology at EMU. He writes poetry and fiction, and will describe in detail scenes he’s written.

On Friday, Ms. Marrufo and Ms. Shousher bid their graduating seniors farewell. Ms. Marrufo shed tears as they gave Taylor one last Brailled item, a dog tag with a Yoda quote.

“Do or do not. There is no try,” it says.

Taylor chose to do.

Contact Nolan Rosenkrans at: nrosenkrans@theblade.com or 419-724-6086, or on Twitter @NolanRosenkrans.

First Published June 1, 2015, 4:00 a.m.