"How to write a blind character" guide?

[steorran_worulde]

Hi,
This post may be stretching the boundaries of this community, since it's not exactly about fandom, but:

trouble directed me here and suggested that people here might have links to things of the form "How to write characters with X disability". The thing I'm particularly investigating at the moment is blindness. I want to know what kinds of things blind people can do that sighted people might expect that they couldn't do, and what kinds of adaptations they make to do these things. I also want to know about what kinds of things blind people find difficult that a sighted person might not expect. And, more generally, I want to know what I should know about blindness and being blind that I might not even know to ask about.

The context in which I'll be putting this information to use is not for writing a blind character in a sighted society, but for designing a culture in which everyone is blind. Still, things aimed at helping authors write blind characters in sighted society will likely still be useful to me.

Comments

[redbird]

I'm not mac, obviously, and don't know what zie meant, but one difference is that a blind person in our society is dealing with a society set up on the assumption that most people can see. In a society where nobody has ever had vision, that wouldn't be the case. For example, there wouldn't be a transport system that relied on large numbers of sighted people to operate vehicles, and risked the lives of people who couldn't see them. (Think carefully about your transport infrastructure, and remember that transport includes food.)