I think you're making a lot of assumptions. Maybe they continue to support themselves, adapting to blindness? Your post seems premised on the idea that blind people cannot get work.

Haben Girma is a DeafBlind attorney. She seems to have done well for herself. There are at least several DeafBlind people with PhDs. Having a disability does not mean you are forever dependent on others for support.

SSI is not meant as anything more than evening the playing field because blind people tend to face discrimination and may not be hired at the level they should be.

That being said, almost all blind people I talk to work and live independently, whether they were born blind or lost their vision later.

A friend of mine who has low vision is going to school to be a pastry chef, and she was 19 when she suddenly went blind.

Another friend was in his teens, and is now a totally blind lawyer.

Probably half of all blind people I know work in either a lighthouse, mostly manufacturing, job, massage, or call center work.

If you want to learn to be independent, excusing other disabilities like severe brain damage or something, you can. You just have to want it.

Most blind people are independent and self-sufficient. You can learn mobility skills and braille at any age. I know a lady who learned to get around with a cane at age 75. I live alone, work full time, and have a great life. You don’t need someone to take care of you. You can take care of yourself with the right skills. Our town has a shuttle bus that I use to go to the grocery store. Big towns have Uber/Lyft. Being blind is not hopeless.

Simple, blind people take care of themselves. My wife and I are both blind, we both work, bring home six figure salaries, and live on the opposite side of the country from our parents. I fully expect that one day my parents will need me to be their care taker, as is the natural flow of life, and I expect to be able to rise to the occasion.

Things like this post, and one of the replies to this post, make me want to say that you should be asking questions about mental health issues, not blindness; I am saying this as someone who has struggled with my own mental health issues from time to time. There are lots of blind people who live happy healthy lives, and there are lots of sighted people who live miserable tragic lives. A disability can be a contributing factor for something like depression, but it is only one part of the larger picture. I have known dozens of blind people in many different life situations and 9 times out of 10 long term negative feelings are a result of things such as lack of skills, lack of education, lack of friendship or companionship, lack of ability to get over their disability and move on with life, etc. One is not doomed to such things just because their eye balls don't work.

The last thing I'm trying to say is that you don't have a right to be depressed; you have just as much the right to be depressed as you have the right to be blind, or def, or left handed, or any of the billions of conditions that life can bring. What's important is how you respond to such conditions. A person with clinical depression can't just choose to be free from their condition; however, they can regularly receive therapy, take medicine, and do whatever else they need to do to do the best they can to deal with their condition. Likewise, a blind person can't choose to be sighted, but they can choose to try and receive training, learn skills, receive education, and make the most of life.

If you are having feelings of depression, please! please! seek help for your mental health issues, instead of putting all of your woes on your eye balls.

People can have other supports than their parents. Siblings, wives/husbands, good friends.

Adaptability can be more difficult, but it really depends on how motivated someone can be to learn. I've had people who were highly motivated and practiced their skills a lot and progressed much faster than average. There are some intensive rehabilitation programs specifically aimed at getting working age people back into the workforce.

If someone had a career where vision was absolutely necessary, then they would need to make a decision regarding a career change. Do they want to learn a new topic, or learn how to adapt their knowledge to something in a related field? For example, I once worked with a taxi driver who lost their vision. But they still wanted to work for the same company, so they ended up being retrained as a dispatcher. Adaptive technology let him access the computer, and he had good knowledge of the city.

Orientation and Mobility training helps with learning how to get around safely, but there are times when it is exceptionally difficult. In those cases, there are delivery services for food.

Losing both vision and hearing can be a great concern for some people, but there are also services that assist them. Depending on where you are, deafblind services have intervenors who can help translate and assist with other tasks. They can also provide training regarding communication as well.

You mentioned someone attacking someone with vision loss.... someone with regular vision can also get mugged as well.

If I can get on my soapbox for a minute. There's this assumption that blind people can't be independent. They absolutely can. There are rehab centers that will have you doing everything from cooking to working with power tools, all under blindfold in case you have any vision. There's also a tendency for blind people to work in fields that deal with the blind, like vocational rehab, special ed, and O&M. While I think it's necessary for us to help our fellow blind people in this manner, I would encourage people to widen their idea of what jobs a blind person can do. I work in information technology. I just spent the last week on my hands and knees inventorying all our equipment. It was difficult, especially because I can't see well enough to scan all those bar codes. That's where using alternative strategies come in. I separated all the boxen based on their model number. I used a magnifier, but a totally blind person could use Seeing AI to read the labels. I then downloaded the fastest free bar code scanner app I could find onto my iPhone, waved it in the general direction of a stack of equipment, and then air-dropped the resulting CSV file to my macbook. Since this approach inevitably led to duplicates and extraneous entries, I used a bit of UNIX terminal magic to remove undesirable data. I then added the resulting entries to a master inventory file.


Why am I saying all this? Because most people--blind or sighted--probably think this sort of thing is impossible without vision. I did it anyway. I realize getting employed is hard, and luck definitely plays a role, but that's true of any job. The blind independence movement is a two-way street. While it's important to get potential employers to realize that blind people can be an asset instead of a liability, it's equally important for blind people to realize they have what it takes to be independent in the first place. Is it hard sometimes? Absolutely! Do I sometimes feel that it's a lost cause? Definitely! But I keep going. You can frame it however you want--as the oppressed blind people overthrowing their evil ableist oppressors, or removing blind people as wards of the state and turning them into productive contributors to the economy, but however you slice it, your going to be happier and healthier if you work towards independence.

I'm one of those lost cases, and I plan on killing myself once my mother dies. My father, who was my original caretaker since I went blind, died last year due to cancer, and even though my sister has made herself available to take care of me once my mother dies I won't stand staying home alone with nothing to do all day while she works. I also lack the motivation to live independently since I see no point in living blind because I have certain requirements of comfort and quality of life that I will never be able to meet.