Learning About Blindness

What is Blindness or Low Vision?

Visually Impaired:  A person is considered visually impaired when, with best correction, he or she has difficulty reading a newspaper, is unable to see objects with peripheral vision, among many other indicators.

Legally blind: This is defined as no better than 20/200 corrected vision in the better eye, or a visual field not extending beyond 20 degrees in the better eye, or a visual efficiency of no more than 20 percent. The "legal" refers to a determination of the person's eligibility for government benefits resulting from his or her visual impairment.

Blindness: A wide array of conditions ranging from a limited ability to see objects with special aids to the absence of light perception. Most people who are blind have some light perception.

1. How Do I Interact with a Blind Person?Introduce yourself by name and make eye contact when speaking.
2. Speak in your usual conversational voice.
3. When a blind person enters the room, identify yourself.
4. Indicate the end of a conversation, and let a blind person know when you are walking away.
5. Feel free to use vision-oriented words such as "see", "look", and "watch."
6. Be specific when giving directions.
7. Don't grab the arm of a person who is blind or visually impaired: offer yours instead.
8. Don't interfere with a blind or visually impaired person's cane, and don't pet or feed dog guides
9. When in doubt, just ask.

As with a person with any disability, the best approach is to interact with the person, not with his or her disability. In general, what you would do or say with a sighted person is appropriate for a person with a visual impairment. However, to be most courteous, here are some hints.

The History Of The Braille Alphabet

Braille was based on a tactile military code called night writing, developed by Charles Barbier in response to Napoleon's demand for a means for soldiers to communicate silently at night and without light. In Barbier's system, sets of 12 embossed dots encoded 36 different sounds. It proved to be too difficult for soldiers to recognize by touch, and was rejected by the military. In 1821 Barbier visited the Royal Institute for the Blind in Paris, where he met Louis Braille. Braille identified two major defects of the code: first, by representing only sounds, the code was unable to render the orthography of the words; second, the human finger could not encompass the whole 12-dot symbol without moving, and so could not move rapidly from one symbol to another. Braille's solution was to use 6-dot cells and to assign a specific pattern to each letter of the alphabet. At first, braille was a one-to-one transliteration of French orthography, but soon various abbreviations, contractions, and even logograms were developed, creating a system much more like shorthand.The expanded English system, called ''grade-2 Braille'' was complete by 1905. For the blind today, braille is an independent writing system rather than a code of printed orthography

Braille   

Braille is writing system which enables blind and partially sighted people to read and write through touch. It was invented by Louis Braille (1809-1852), who was blind and became a teacher of the blind. It consists of patterns of raised dots arranged in cells of up to six dots in a 3 x 2 configuration. Each cell represents a letter, numeral or punctuation mark. Some frequently used words and letter combinations also have their own single cell patterns.
There are a number of different versions of Braille:

Grade (Uncontracted) : which consists of the 26 standard letters of the alphabet and punctuation. It is only used by people who are first starting to read Braille. Grade 2 (Contracted) :which consists of the 26 standard letters of the alphabet, punctuation and contractions. The contractions are employed to save space because a Braille page cannot fit as much text as a standard printed page. Books, signs in public places, menus, and most other Braille materials are written in Contracted Braille.Grade 3 :which is used mainly in personal letters, diaries, and notes, and also in literature to a limited extent. It is a kind of shorthand, with entire words shortened to a few letters. There is no official standard for this version of Braille.
Braille has been adapted to write many different languages, including ''Chinese'', and is also used for musical and mathematical notation, chess etc.