How do blind people negotiate the world?

[CarlaH]

I don't know how I can have reached an advanced age without wondering about this but yesterday I saw on TV a blind person with their guide dog and wondered how on earth they know where they are going.

I know the guide dog can help in avoiding obstacles and with crossing the road etc but the person still has to know where they want to go and the route to get there.

Then I started wondering about cooking. For example one tin feels much like another tin so how do they know what is inside.

Obviously now we have mobile phones I suppose they can ask google for a route to their destination but that is quite a modern phenomenon.

Can anybody enlighten me? I feel a bit of a twit for asking but I genuinely have no idea how some issues can be negotiated.

This YouTube channel should help.

https://youtube.com/@TommyEdisonXP?si=5h-SA8F5N4LIOaeY

Tommy's videos are great and there are lots of other blind/VI people who share information online about the strategies they use for things. Just search on YouTube.

And organisations like the RNIB have information for blind people you could read. e.g. tips for cooking https://www.rnib.org.uk/living-with-sight-loss/independent-living/cooking/

Echolocation - like dolphins and bats.

Be My Eyes helps for reading labels and lots of people have a braille maker and can then make their own labels

https://youtube.com/@lucyedwards?si=IDWVZ0qtrwAEWg_R

lucy edwards is another great vlogger who talks about navigating in the uk (and abroad) as a blind person

Visually impaired person here - it in my experience takes a lot of planning. There's a website (the name escapes me at the moment) which does lust accessible venues.

At some traffic lights there's a spinning cone underneath the button

There are now a lot of apps out there to help with navigation

With tins there's a thing you can to label the tins. It then tells you what's inside

I have a blind colleague who has set up a business creating braille greetings cards, menus etc. how many of us have ever even considered the need for this. He is an inspiration.

Also blind doesn’t necessarily mean zero sight. It can do, but many blind people have some sight, and most use what they have very effectively.

Knowing routes - same as most people, remembering how many roads to cross, landmarks along the way, what it’s near. If you do use a guide dog (most don’t) you can teach the dog to take you to that location. So when I worked with guide dogs people would teach the dog where their workplace door was and a command for where their desk/workstation is, favourite shops, just anywhere they regularly went to would be set as a command. Likewise with supermarkets, you can teach the dog where various items are and use that to have them navigate the store (bloody pain when they rearrange everything though).

My next door neighbour has been blind since birth, she is amazing. She is also mostly wheelchair bound these days but prior to her latest illness she travelled all over the country by train on her own with an assistance dog. She gets up to Scotland, down to London etc but with the aid of a carer now.

She has a gadget that looks like a pen and reads barcodes and labels on products although I think it requires a slighted person to set it up.

She reads braille and uses siri and other text to talk apps.

She has spent hours teaching my dd how she "sees" with her hands and other senses.

I guess when you have no choice you adapt.

One of our neighbours has sight loss . He counts his steps when walking and feels for the garden walls.

I've known two blind friends (both totally blind from childhood), though one sadly no longer with us. He had a guide dog and that did seem to make everything easier. The dog learned routes and avoided obstacles, knew when to cross the road etc. My friend could go out on his own and get around fairly straightforwardly, and ask poeple for help finding particular locations if needed.

The other friend doesn't like dogs so doesn't want one. He uses a white stick and it's quite effective in everyday situations, but he has often had horrific mishaps including falling off a train platform! He has quite a slow and tentative walk, including indoors, so if he bumps into something it's not too painful. he has developed a degree of echolocation but it's better at telling him what the surroundings are like than specific objects.

There are an increasing number of computer gadgets that help, like e-readers that can read text and turn it into braille or speech, etc.

One of my students was completely blind with zero sight from birth. He told me how when he travelled home to Birmingham and how he could negotiate New street station. If you don’t know this it’s a multi platform station underground. He had a cane and not a guide dog. He graduated about 19 years ago and I do hope he did well as apart from being one of the brightest students I ever had the pleasure of meeting his life was infinitely harder. He absolutely never ever complained. He did say he had tuned his hearing and used sound far more than hearing people. He also told me about the little whirring devices under pedestrian crossing boxes that visually impaired people use if there are no bleeps on a crossing.

There’s Matthew and Paul, a couple from the us. They make quite a few videos. Paul has retinitis pigmentosa (I think that’s you spell it). They’ve done videos showing what Paul sees. Paul has written and illustrated two children’s books. He has a guide dog. They have videos explaining the guide dog process for Paul. How Paul gets about, how he does stuff in the house and all that sort of thing. They also have less serious videos, just fyi, the odd good humoured prank and Paul has some amazing, if astonishing, stories.

Tommy Edison is also very good. He has a video where he rides an electric skateboard. But also has many videos comparing him (totally blind from birth) and those who has different vision impairments.

Thanks for all the responses. I did see one person on YouTube showing that she scans the barcodes on tins using her phone but that would only have been possible recently. I don't even know how somebody could actually do their shopping although I can believe it must be easier now with smartphones and apps etc.

I will now investigate the people mentioned in the answers.

I don't know how I haven't given this a moments thought until now.

I was in an airport in Norway waiting for some time and noticed some strange patterns on the floor.

Couldn't figure out what they were. Then finally realised they were slightly raised bumps to allow blind people to feel and navigate.

When you look at things in the world and sometimes they have a design feature you can't quite figure out what it is for, raised bumps etc the odds are it has been modified to assist blind people. There are probably not enough of these things around, but you can notice them if you look carefully.

I noticed today on the toilet bleach bottle there was braille.

I remember in primary one or primary two, we made braille with dried pea type things that were cut in half. We did like touching different things with a blind fold on to see if we could figure out what they were. A guide dog came to visit. And we tried different safety glasses/goggle things that demonstrated different levels of sight/different conditions.

Also most people you see with a white stick or guide dog are visually impaired rather than completely blind.
My brother is visually impaired & uses both. He has like a large black circle in his vision so can watch TV, read some text & use a computer & smartphone but struggles to walk as cant see in front.
Often has people ridicule him for using his smartphone in public & accuse him of faking being blind.
It's odd things he finds hard stairs are no problem but slopes are very hard to navigate. The ball on the end of the white stick helps him navigate slopes.
I'm sure there's many visually impaired mumsnetters who can explain better.

I’ve always thought it must be extra difficult if you drop something.

There's tactile paving on the pavement too. You may have noticed raised dots near the edges of pavements.

I joined a group activity and it turned out 90 % of them were blind. They seemed to have a great social life going on holidays and out for meals etc. A man invited me to his house for coffee and told me he wad also deaf from birth. His house was set up with kettle and equipment to cook safely. A lot of them had spent time at that hospital where they train people with disabilities.Forget the name.
One girl had been married to an eye surgeon and he divorced her when her sight went!

I was talking to a volunteer who was fundraising for the guide dogs charity. He said that the charity train the dog, after it’s been socialised with a family, train the blind person and the dog together and get this: because a lot of blind people are on the lower end of the economic scale due to their disability, THEY PAY FOR ALL THE DOG FOOD AND VET’S BILLS FOR THE LIFE OF THE DOG !!!!!!
I signed up for £4.00 a month.
My father was blinded in the war and guide dogs were his lifeline. I remember them fondly.

There’s a documentary series on channel 5 player, about guide dogs and the process, from birth going through the stages. And there’s a bit about other assistance dogs too.

just in case anyone is interested.

I remember being fascinated by this as a child. My parents used to blindfold me, and get me to guess objects by feel, do puzzles where pieces have to be put into holes, or when I was older, to count money by sorting coins into piles. There was a park that had a Braille map: I used to love feeling it, even though I couldn't understand the meaning. They once blindfolded me and walked me round the park, and got me to try walking without holding their hand (while they watched closely). I remember feeling when the path changed to grass. In school holidays, I used to challenge myself to stay blindfolded at home for a long time; I sometimes managed an hour before I got bored. I remember noticing how I could hear and feel everything much more when I couldn't see.

What a bizarre thing to do

(And yes I know it's part of the training to be a guide runner but that's different)

That documentary on TV last September about Guide Dog training pointed out that training a guide dog costs £35,000, then when the guide is is placed with a client, there's the on-going cost like any other dog of food, vaccinations, insurance - about £1000 a year per dog which is why Guide Dogs are always trying to raise money.