My Blind Experience

Have you ever been so determined to beat a level on a mobile game you've stayed up way too late, gotten angry, maybe even threw your phone when you lost? If so, you clearly weren't happy playing it. Yet you played it anyway because the satisfaction of beating a particularly hard level is a powerful incentive. When you finally win you feel a sense of accomplishment. You're a winner! You're proud of yourself. And you might mistake this feeling for happiness. Before I went blind my life was spent in pursuit of satisfaction. Difficult challenges at work brought out the competitive nature in me. I got a kick out of doing the things my coworkers couldn't and making myself the most valuable, necessary member of the team. If you could weld 1,000 parts in a shift I wouldn't stop until I welded 1,001. Now that I'm blind I live in the moment. My life isn't a game anymore - I'm not approaching each new day as an opportunity to beat my previous high score. It too...

Medina_Dina 2 points · 5 days ago Hi everybody, My name is Madina and I am a student at George Washington University. My classmates and I are working on a project linked to assistive technology and the accessibility of products and services for visually impaired people. You will help us a lot if you answer the following questions. Appreciate your participation. What age group describes your best? Degree of blindness. Do you use phones for assistance in your daily life? What apps or programs help you in your daily life? Do you use finance or grocery-related apps that provide special services for the blind? Will you be willing to change your bank if it offered distinctive services for visually impaired people? What is the most challenging task in your daily life due to your sight limitations? What services or products would you like to be more accessible for visually impaired people? Thank you once again and have a wonderful day! Kind regards, Madina BlindManOnFire 1 point · 2 day...

My computer is on the fritz. The charger only works when it feels like it and even when it works, sometimes when I'm using it the battery drains faster than it recharges. It just happened again. A young blind girl who goes by u/yamallama0330 was sick of the pity and lashed out at her parents, then came to r/Blind to ask if she went too far - "I am a blind teen and live a pretty freaking lively life. I do Taekwondo, I do horseback riding, I’m a head producer for a student led feature length film, I’m in multiple academic honors societies, I LITERALLY WORK AT QDOBA, and I’m always just the blind girl. "Everyone looks at me with pity, and the comments I get are unbearable. "Why do people think that everyone wants to be cured, or that we can’t live fulfilling lives? “I’ll pray for your cure”, “oh you’re so pretty for a blind girl!”, “you can’t work, you’re blind”. Literally so sick and tired of it. "My parents are pushing for a cure, genetic testing and pok...

I used to work as a cabinet maker during the day and teach math at the community college at night. The guys I worked with at the cabinet shop were mostly Spanish speaking immigrants. Many of them hadn't finished high school and none of them had been to college. A few had been in prison. They didn't think they had the brains to understand college level courses. There's a quick little trick I know to figure out the degree of any angle if you know the lengths of the sides on either side of the angle. Suppose you want to cut a 6" by 8" board diagonally.   What angle would you set your saw to make the cut? The trick is to use inverse tan (length/width), or inverse tan 6/8. Just plug it into the scientific calculator on your smart phone and make sure your calculator is in degrees instead of radians and you'll get the answer: just a kiss under 36.87 degrees. It took me forever to get college students to understand this concept. The immigrant workers in the cabinet sh...

I don't know Braille. I don't plan to learn it. I think today's technology makes Braille obsolete. That's the excuse I give. I'll get to the real reason at the bottom of the page but let's look at the reasons Braille is obsolete first. My phone can read text messages aloud to me. And Reddit. And the newspaper. And any book ever published. And any web site. And any magazine. And any blog, even this one. I can point my phone's camera at a sign in Braille and an app will read the English translation aloud to me. Braille is slower, more cumbersome, and harder to find. Only a few books have been translated into Braille. Even the fastest Braille readers read much slower than people reading words printed on a page. A copy of the Bible in Braille weighs 70 pounds and takes up five feet of bookshelf space. Getting a book in Braille from the library takes weeks. The phone in my pocket wins in every category. There are advantages to knowing Braille. It offers an escape...

Before I went blind I never imagined people who lose their eyesight grieve their loss. It's tough going through it. There are days I feel jealous of people who take driving for granted like I used to. There are days I feel left out when everybody around me laughs at something I didn't see. There are hard days when I'd sell my soul for just a half hour more of decent eyesight so I could fix the broken oil pan cover flapping under my dad's car or get the hot water in the bathroom shower working again. There are really bad days when I suspect I deserve this and wonder which flaw in my character I'm being punished for. It's hard grieving our lost eyesight. I wish that's all we had to deal with, but there's more coming. What did you want to be when you were growing up? The Apollo missions happened when I was a little kid so all my school mates wanted to be astronauts - after we played for the Dallas Cowboys, of course. We had big dreams back then. All kid...

I was diagnosed with retinitus pigmentosa in July 2021. It's a genetic condition that causes the cells in the retina to die. It's incurable and untreatable. I'm legally blind already. Total darkness is coming soon. It's probably the best thing that ever happened to me. When I told the kids I was legally blind and probably two years from being totally blind my son asked me if there was anything I wanted to do while I still could. The first thing I said was Mount Rushmore because my mom is always telling me how cool it is, but I thought about it and realized this isn't my mom's bucket list, it's mine. And I didn't want to go to Mount Rushmore, I wanted to water ski. So two of my kids and I each chipped in a couple grand and we bought a ski boat. I put the grandkids in charge of naming it so it's name is Fuzzy Peach. I'm convinced that's the greatest name for a boat in the whole history of history. We spent half a week on the Tenness...