Challenges That Blind People Face

People who have good eyesight may find it hard to imagine the life of person who is blind or who has poor vision. Knowing the challenges blindness creates may help people who have good eyesight understand what blind people face each day.

Physical movement is one of the challenges for people with low vision or complete blindness. These people often have difficulty when they go outside an environment they know well. A simple activity like walking down a street is a nightmare if they don’t know the area. Therefore, many people with low vision or blindness will take a friend or family member with them. To make their daily lives easier, blind people have to learn where everything is in their home. Furniture certainly has to stay in the same place. If a member of the household moves somthing, a blind person could hit it and hurt themselves. There should also be as few things as possible in the house of a blind person. Too many things in their house makes their lives harder.

Blindness causes considerable social challenges, because it limits the activities that blind people can do. Firstly, it affects a person’s ability to perform many job duties. That means it’s more difficult to get a job. This not only can affect a person’s finances, but also their self-esteem. Blindness may also cause difficulties with doing things outside of the workplace, such as sports and academics. Social challenges like these limit a blind person’s ability to meet people. This can make their self-esteem worse, and make them lonely.

Technology poses a challenge for blind people as well. For example, a blind person cannot read the writing on a web page. Searching the Internet requires screen reading software which reads out loud the information on a website, but the software is complicated and it requires a lot of time to learn how to use. People who have limited vision may have problems looking at websites as well, particularly the small fonts, icons and screen colors used by many sites. People with low vision may require special equipment that enlarges a screen significantly.