Writing Blind/Low Vision Characters

Writing Blind/Low Vision Characters

Time for another one of these I have decided! As always, this is based on personal experience with blind low vision people, classwork, and research. I do wear glasses, but I am not blind/low vision and this is not my lived experience. Please feel free to question, correct, and comment, as long as you are respectful! Thanks so much for reading :) On to the good stuff!

Vocab

Blind describes a person who has very little to no vision. This can be written with a lowercase or capital b (blind or Blind). Blind does not always mean no vision. It is medically defined as having vision of less than 20/200 in the better eye. Someone can be able to distinguish color, light and dark, or shapes, and still be blind.

blind refers to the medical condition of having little to no vision.

Blind (note the capital b) refers to the sociocultural experience of being a nonseeing person in a predominantly vision-based society. This distinction is newer and less common than with the Deaf community, but is becoming more popular, particularly with DeafBlind people. As always, the important thing is respecting what people identify as and want to be called

Visually impaired is a term that covers the spectrum of vision differences.

The term does not include disorders that affect one or more of the “basic psychological processes.” What this means is that though vision or the use of visual information may be impaired, if the nature of that impairment is not related to the structure of the eye, it would not be described as “visual impairment.” Examples include perceptual disabilities, brain injuries, or dyslexia.

B/VI is an acronym, standing for Blind/Visually Impaired, that can be used to refer to the community as a whole.

Low vision describes a person who is not fully blind, but whose level of vision is significantly impaired. More technically, this refers to vision that cannot be corrected through medical or surgical procedures, or conventional eyeglasses.

Legally blind (in the USA) refers to an individual whose vision is affected beyond what glasses can correct. This is a bit difficult to describe in writing but: If the strongest prescription possible cannot bring that person’s vision up to 20/20, they are legally blind. This is not the same as having no vision.

Deafblind or DeafBlind refers to an individual with any combination of vision and Deaf gain/hearing loss, ranging from mild to profound Deaf gain/hearing loss and from low vision to total blindness.

Visual acuity refers to clarity of vision and is the source of numbers like 20/20, 20/30, etc. This is another one that’s weird to describe so stick with me. My vision is about 20/40 (last I went to the eye doctor lol) which means that I see at 20 feet what someone with 20/20 vision sees at 20 feet. The top number is always 20, and refers to the 20/20 standard, while the lower number describes the visual acuity of the person in question. If their visual acuity is 20/10, that means they see at ten feet what a person with 20/20 vision would see at 20 feet. If they see at 20 feet what a person with 20/20 vision would see at 200 feet, they are medically considered blind.

Visual functioning is (basically) a measure of how well a person can use visual information in completing tasks. This is assessed a number of different ways.

Residual vision is another way of referring to the functional vision of a person with low vision or blindness. 

I’m not going to go through all the different kinds of blindness and eye conditions, because that would take too long, and this is already a pretty long vocab section. But there are lots of different kinds of conditions and disabilities affecting eyes and vision! Please explore them :)

Blind Culture?

Is there Blind culture in the same way that there is Deaf culture? Difficult to say. It’s an ongoing debate, and I’m going to briefly address each side, and then leave it up to you to research further how this might affect your character and your story.

Historically, the blind community have rejected the idea that blind individuals have a shared culture. The reasons for this are very well outlined in this letter, which I highly recommend reading. To summarize it here: Blind people are not isolated from sighted people in the same way that Deaf people have been historically isolated from hearing people. The reason for this is generally acknowledged to be the lack of, or existence of, a language barrier. Blind people use the same language as the sighted people around them, while Deaf people have used signed language as opposed to spoken language. Where no language barrier exists, this position argues, no separate culture forms or needs to form.

On the other hand - there are certainly experiences that are shared by people across the visually impaired spectrum that fully sighted people do not have. Blind or low vision people access and interpret the world in different ways. There is, analogous to Deaf communities, a history of blind or low vision children being educated separately from sighted children, and of discrimination throughout the lifespan that has isolated visually impaired people from sighted society.

What does all of this mean? It means that there is less consensus about what it means to be visually impaired, and what values or traditions unite that experience. It means that there is less of a framework for how your visually impaired character might relate to other visually impaired characters or their broader community. I highly encourage further exploration within your own story, as well as making sure that whatever choices you’re making about the character’s relationship to their vision is grounded in conscious choice and research. Just because there are no easy answers about a collective blind culture does not mean that a blind character can be written the same as a sighted character but without the vision.

Assistive Technology

Assistive technology (as a reminder, this is not specific to visual impairments) refers to pretty much anything used to make the lives of disabled people easier.

Official American government definition is:  “Any item, piece of equipment or product system, whether acquired commercially off the shelf, modified, or customized, that is used to increase, maintain, or improve the functional capabilities of children with disabilities. The term does not include a medical device that is surgically implanted, or the replacement of such device.”

Braille is a tactile system of writing in which raised dots represent letters, numbers, and punctuation. More on this later.

A screen reader is a software program that either reads written text on a screen aloud, or produces a Braille display.

Speech-to-text programs are software programs that…convert speech to text.

Text-to-speech or TTS are programs that convert written text into spoken speech. These were also commonly used on landline phones by d/Deaf people before text messaging became commonplace. 

Seeing Eye dogs are service dogs that are trained to help their blind owners move and navigate independently.

White canes are white canes with a red stripe. These are both navigational tools for B/VI people, and used to communicate to others that the person carrying it is B/VI. Accordingly, it is illegal in some US states to carry a white cane if you are not visually impaired. Only 2-8% of B/VI people actually use them, though, and it requires dedicated practice to use them effectively. They are designed to vibrate differently when they come in contact with different types of surfaces, and proper practice can help cane users distinguish between different obstacles. 

Braille and the Braille Literacy Crisis

Braille, as mentioned before, is a tactile way of writing, which helps B/VI people read and write effectively. I’m not going to do an exhaustive explanation, but essentially, a different combination of raised dots represents each letter of the written alphabet. The sentence I’m writing, rewritten in Braille, would have the exact same words and structure, but would be expressed in raised dots. There are abbreviated forms that are less commonly used and may be used by more skilled readers or those reading texts with specialized, space-saving abbreviations.

Less than 10 percent of legally blind in the US can read Braille, and only 10 percent of legally blind children are currently learning it. This is a huge problem. Over 70% of blind adults are unemployed, and up to 50% of blind students drop out of high school. There is a strong, scientifically supported link between literacy and employment.

Technology should supplement literacy, not replace it. Screen readers and text-to-speech are great tools, but are not an adequate replacement for literacy.

Reading English text is not always the best possible method of reading. The misguided belief that reading Braille is isolating and stigmatizing leads many to push reading text over reading Braille, even when this is inappropriate or even impossible. Some children achieve higher levels of literacy through reading Braille.

Implications for your writing: Can your character read Braille? Why, or why not? What impact does their illiteracy have on their life?

Rethink

I’ve tried a couple different headings here cuz as always, don’t want to tell people unequivocally not to write things. But these are things you should really think hard about before you include them in your writing.

So, things to rethink:

Overused tropes for B/VI characters:

Blind seer/blind mystic

Innocent, pure, noble, sweet etc.

Bumbling oaf B/VI person

Feeling people’s faces as a way to “know what they look like”

Does not happen in real life, more of a stereotype/sighted person’s fantasy

“Helen Keller didn’t exist” TikTok conspiracy theory (not a writing thing but a pet peeve I can’t not mention)

This is ableist. The only reason people think she wasn’t able to accomplish things is because she was deafblind and that’s fucking bullshit. It is not a cute silly TikTok joke. It’s ableism, and it’s disgusting.

Blindness negating power/ability.

This can be anything from an actual superpower (X-Men) to a technological advance (Star Trek) to a supernatural ability (Avatar: The Last Airbender.)

In real life, this could be having someone with other senses that compensate to an unrealistic degree, or echolocation, which, while it proves successful for some people, is hard, takes a ton of effort, and doesn’t work for everyone.

Resources/Recommendations

Please add recommendations in reblogs and comments! I really haven’t watched a lot of TV or movies that have blind characters, which sucks :/

Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law By Haben Girma is an autobiography of a deafblind woman that is incredibly well written and discusses independence and activism.

The World I Live In by Helen Keller describes life as a deafblind individual and is really powerful and beautiful.