I am a partially sighted blind person. My cane helps me move through and explore the physical world while screen readers and other assistive tech help me do the same with all things cyber. I also tend to have very little confidence that the Powers That Be really know what is best for me.

Good luck

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 1st, 2023

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  • Two types of light receptors in retina.

    One, called cones, addresses color. Distinguishes gross changes in color across entire visible spectrum. More durable, mostly in macula (central vision), and slow to detect change.

    The other, called rods, address intensity (brightness). Distinguishes fine changes in light intensity normally presented in gray scale (shades of black and white). More fragile, mostly in prepheral retina, quickly detects change.

    RP and Choroideremia tend to kill off the rods in the peripheral retina first eventually moving on to the cones centered in the macula. Fewer rods mean less ability to discerned between changes in shades of color. For example it may be difficult between ruby red and infra red crayons when right next to each other but much easier when separated by florescent yellow.

    Or at least that’s the gist of the what I remember from a conversation with a low vision occupational therapist. Can’t really see enough to test it any more.

    High contrast is key for anything you need to see right now.

    Be careful trusting what you see. Movement, distance, and definition (shape) perception could be off as well




  • Darn! I did it again!

    I colored your situation with my own instead getting more information about what you really needed and answering your question. It is a bad habit and I apologize.

    NFB had what’s now a booklet that helped me a lot at the time: Cane: Instructions in Cane Travel for Blind People

    • I particularly found section 3 Actually Walking Around pretty useful in the short term but in the end it has all proved useful so the entire thing was a good read

    It looks like it could be a useful read for a sighted person trying to spot you as well

    There have been a number of things I have listened to and read since that have provided some help as well…but it was harder to remember where I found them. If I hadn’t remembered originally finding the NFB one above on the page for their Free White Cane Program I might not of known where to find that either.

    As for my situation, that is good advice that I will be following until I can make my trip and get that in person training. I can do well enough with the day to day now. My end goal, if I can manage to afford it, is to independently travel as much as I can. I never took the time to do that back when I could still see and am regretting it a bit. My O&M skills could use a bit more finesse for unfamiliar areas that I may not have as much time to learn as I would like.


  • Good vibes are always welcome and send some of mine back at ya.

    Cannot speak for the group at large but a nice to have from a personal standpoint would be stickied How Tos hosted in your community for things like alt text that we could use links to refer people to.

    Otherwise it is still too early to have a good idea where the needs are. A lot of time still going into figuring out how things work and where things are. Sure I will have more to bring up as I learn more.

    Thanks for keeping us in mind and have a great day!




  • Would better walkability and affordability let you save enough money to visit another town that does have O&M specialists available?

    This is something I am considering for myself now.

    The worst of my vision loss happened at the beginning of the Pandemic when there were no in person services available in the area. At that time my O&M training consisted of 3 hour long phone calls. I had a little remaining vision at the time and no one was really supposed to go anywhere at the time anyway so it was enough. Now that I have almost no useful vision remaining and things have improved enough that they are doing in person training again I have been trying to get in person training. Unfortunately, even though there are specialists within the normal travel distances I live in a notoriously high crime area so no one is willing to come to me.

    To get in person O&M training I will have to travel to a neighboring town so I am in the process of saving enough money to spend a few days some where I can get it. Not easy because there is not a lot extra right now.



  • Cold beer or glass of wine and music…sometimes listening or, when really stressed, playing piano or guitar while singing, all badly I must admit…and the singing usually requires more than one adult beverage.

    Music is really a part of everything in my life really. I use it to:

    • Wake up
    • Get energized
    • Relax
    • Express my mood
    • Concentrate
    • Distract myself
    • Fall asleep

    If I am not playing it I am listening to it. If I am not listening to it it’s playing in my head





  • We will see what happens. Reddit is hard to let go especially for people in othe r/Blind community that fills a very real need. Plus they have been making a lot of cosmetic changes that may help appease some people and bring them back into the fold. Between that very real need we were filling and those cosmetic changes some of us are very likely to be drawn back in.

    As for me, a short visit there yesterday proved to me that I cannot allow myself to go back. The r/Blind subreddit was what brought me to that site in the first place and was the one community I was a part of there that was largely resistant to the toxicity so prevalent through the rest of the site. Yesterday’s visit was heartbreaking, showing me how much the toxicity of the rest of the site had infiltrated r/Blind…and even so, the urge to dive back in was very strong. I felt like a recovering gambling addict walking into a casino for the first time since giving it up. I just cannot afford to go back to that.

    While I hope that we will all continue to be a part of building something new, and hopefully better, we will have to see how may of us resist reddit’s siren call.

    The need in the fediverse is at least as strong as the need r/Blind on reddit. I cannot imagine that building up this community will take any less time and effort than building up r/Blind on reddit originally did bit it should prove well worth it in the end.

    A note to the admins and mods of rBlind.com and its communities:

    Thank you for getting this started and providing a community for those of us with no place at reddit can support one another in our blindness and our visual impairments.


  • we are not redditors anymore, we don’t belong there

    This is something that became very clear to me when I made the mistake of going back for a visit yesterday and found a lot of that “fear, derision, doubt, apathy” in one of the last places I expected to find it. It was heartbreaking but did make it clear that we (or, at least, I) really do not belong there anymore.

    It is time to help build something new.



  • Cane. Which, now that I think about it, most sighted people I know think is stupid. They all seem to think that there’s tiny portable magic radar, sonar, infrared, VR stuff that’s widely available and actually works.

    Over the course of my life I have had the chance to support a lot of tech, including a couple of medical prototypes that were supposed to have that kind of magic. Yet after my vision loss it was what amounted to a long white stick that had the most beneficial affects on my life. Sometimes low tech is the best tech.