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Home | Your community | Blogs | Sandi Wassmer | Debunking a few myths about what it means to be registered blind

Posted in Sandi's blog on 6 April 2010 | 2 Comments

I am really not trying to be flippant and I don't want to seem to be riding rough shot over an issue as important as what it means to be registered blind, but I think I have just had my fill with the barrage of ill-considered questions about my eyesight and have decided its time to do some myth debunking, but because the inspiration for doing such a thing has been driven solely by people who ask questions about it when they have clearly not consulted even a single brain cell, I am apologising in advance if any tinges of sarcasm seep through.

So, here goes:

If you are registered 'blind', then does that mean you see nothing?

Not necessarily. In the UK, 97% of people who are registered blind have some residual vision, so that means most of us still have use of some eyesight, but it varies widely from person to person and over time, as many people who are registered blind have eye diseases that are degenerative. And, by the way, waving your hands in front of someone’s eyes who is registered blind is just plain irritating.

Can you get glasses for that?

Well, in short, no. People who are registered blind do not simply have a problem with the way that the lens in the front of the eye works. Glasses or contact lenses dispensed from an optician are used to correct any errors in this lens for what is commonly known as either nearsightedness or farsightedness. Although some people who are registered blind, like me, benefit from glasses because they have a problem with the lens at the front of the eye, this will not be the cause of their blindness, which will invariably be an underlying eye condition. So, suggesting a blind person visit an optician is a tad redundant, as the process of registering blind does not happen through self-diagnosis.

What can blind people actually see?

How long is a piece of string? It is pretty impossible to gauge, because there are many different eye conditions and even though these conditions have been grouped and named, most eye conditions have sub categories that share similar characteristics but present in different ways. For example, I have Retinitis Pigmentosa, but so far, I have never met another person with RP whose eyesight is exactly like mine. RP affects some 20,000 people in the UK, but as research is now uncovering, there are some hundred, probably more, different flavours of RP. But even so, eye conditions affect people differently based on so many variables. Some conditions are degenerative, some curable if caught early, some are treatable and alongside these variables are those around the individual - the state of their general health and the stage at which the disease is. And then, yes, there is more, for most, it varies from day to day, depending on other factors, such as light conditions, stress, how much sleep they’ve had and like everyone else, how much time they have spent staring at their computer.

Why don't you look blind?

This one, I refuse to answer. It is far too ridiculous and if I did, I would have to use words that are not fit for publication!

About Sandi

Businesswoman Sandi Wassmer registered blind in 2008. In her blog, she shares with us the 'shenanigans of visual impairment'.

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