If you can’t maybe stick to nontragic narratives around disability. Yes, that last sentence was to see if you can stomach reading about eyeball trauma. I mean YOU imagine having a piece of a coke bottle driven into your eyeball on impact with the ground. I have met a couple people who were blinded by a tragic accident, but it’s not really heroic or anything, frankly it’s just horrifying. Point is, diseases like retinitis pigmentosa, or rubella, conditions such as albinism, or cataracts are likely responsible for the majority of blind folks out there. I’m not even sure that’s a real chemical compound. Okay, I don’t know anyone who was blinded because of 0464. I’m not sure what the exact statistics are, but I know a lot more people who were born blind or went blind in childhood than who went through a tragic accident involving, I don’t know, 0464. I’m blind because rubella in utero sucks and that caused me to end up blind (congenital cataracts), deaf and with a congenital heart defect. So you were blinded by a tragic accident involving either fireworks or spilled chemicals?įor the last damn time, I am not Daredevil, okay. Being blind or visually impaired is on a spectrum of not seeing, rather than being a static condition. Sometimes it’s blurry, sometimes blind people can’t see color, sometimes it’s all dialed down to seeing things within the radius of a toilet paper tube. More on that later.) ANYWAY, it’s possible to be blind and still SEE STUFF. (They can drive cars, y’all, I can’t do that. They sometimes have things like Coloboma. I’ve met people who are blind in one eye who lead their lives like fully sighted people. For example, you’ve got people like me who are legally blind because of one eye being blind and the other is low vision. The rest of us see on a scale of blindness. Here’s a fun factoid for you! Two percent (2%) of the TOTAL blind population is completely blind.
How blind write software#
Well, I have Dragon anyway, it’s a text-to-speech software program that is trainable! So blind people just see darkness right? Because the world has adapted to us in a really neat way. Some of my blinder friends use screen readers or text to speech software to post their Tweets and blogposts. I wear reading glasses and use the internet like everybody else.
Not great, but it’s good enough for government work fiction-writing work. I’m blind in one eye, I can see out of my left eye…. Okay let’s talk about me as a small case study. Hey, if you’re blind, how are you using twitter? Or this blog? I don’t have time to answer Every Single Question that comes along my Twitter timeline, so instead of doing that, I’ve polled some of my writer buddies (and ganked some of my favorite questions from Twitter) to give you an overview! Because I’m nice or something. Well, I get a lot of questions on Twitter.
Maybe you went and researched things at the National Federation for the Blind (NFB), or you called up your local lighthouse chapter, or you stopped a random blind person in the street, or you found me on Twitter.Īnyway, you tried to do your research but it’s not quite clicking. So you want to write a blind character? But you’re not blind? You’re wondering how on earth you’re going to do that? (Unless you’re willing to pay her for the job, in which case: ask away.) Note, you can ask her followup questions in the comments, but please don’t ask her to critique your manuscript or characters. Elsa writes a lot on the subject of disability and diversity, and here, she’s going to teach us sighted oundaolks a thing or two about what blindness is and how you might tackle the subject in your stories. Elsa Sjunneson-Henry is a bonafide bad-ass, and she doesn’t need Daredevil’s skills to do it.