When I'm alone or with family I tend to rock back and forth either sitting or standing, though I'm self conscious enough not to do it in public. This behavior started right after I lost all useful vision back when I was 31. I've read speculation that blindisms might actually be a sign of autism, however I have characteristics that are totally contrary to an autism diagnosis such as thriving in chaos and hating repetitive tasks.

I have some useful vision but colour perception is very poor for me. So I like really bright stuff. Like neon, day glo bright.
I was also given a piece of advice from a mobility instructor that to counter me not seeing traffic, make sure traffic sees me by wearing bright colours too (as well as reflective stuff at night time). I have a collection of very bright bags and coats now that I wear when outdoors.
Other stuff - I much prefer white text on black background so the chalkboard trend is bloody brilliant - everything in my house is labelled up with the stuff.

I have one I call the 'chameleon walk', where you don't put your weight on your next step until you know it's safe to do so.

I have very, very little vision and can only see like 2-3 colors, yellow, orange, and blue. Because of my eye damage, yellow things, especially large, bright yellow things are obviously yellow, but they have a blue glow around them. It's the only way I can really tell yellow from orange/green.

So, I collect yellow stuff sometimes, I also look around a lot because I have Charles Bonnet syndrome which is basically seeing visual hallucinations constantly. Mine happen to be horror movie type shit, screaming faces, skeletons, creepypasta images, and, as of late, a very angry ostrich.

I turn my head a lot and am pretty constantly moving my eyes around.

I’m completely colorblind, as well as day blind and legally blind. I LOVE anything shiny or sparkly. I can literally sit and stare at something super sparkly reflecting in the light for forever.

Blindisms can vary greatly, depending on amount of residual vision, other conditions, cognitive ability and stress. I had an ex-girlfriend who would rock, but she would rock a LOT when she was excited or otherwise stressed (She rocked a lot during exams).

For some people with residual visual, they may like looking at sparkly things and lights (I've had a few clients who stare at the sun, something we strongly suggest again). In some cases, those with very low vision may also poke themselves in in the eyes. The pressure causes the nerves in the eyes to fire, and the brain receives some stimulation from it. Long term, it often causes eye damage and a sunken in look for the eyes.

Some younger children also like swings (the ones that swing back and forth, as well as the ones that spin around), because it stimulates the vestibular system. I've literally seen children spend their entire lunchtime on a swing.

Here is an article that discuss a bit about blindisms.

http://blindchildrensfund.org/for-families/tips-for-parents/blindisms-strange-behaviors-that-have-meaning/

This is a very well tucked away thing for me, and It can be my personality type as well. I own both a fidget cube and a fidget spinner.

I can’t sit for long without stimulation. So I use to rip up paper, cut my finger nails, play with the nail clipper, rip up staples, folding paper, ETC.... I only do this stuff or spin around and around in my chair when it’s all audio and very little physical interaction. If I am listening to an audio book or on a audio social media site, listening to a long youtube video, just reocrding my voice, ETC... I have to keep my senses going. So. Yeah, I know play with the fidget cube or fidget spinner.

Well, I don't really think of blindisms like that. Usually, my friends and I use the word blindism as a negative term. Like a blind person rocking back and forth is a blindism.

When I had vision, it wasn't enough to get as much out of live-action or line-art, so I wound up with a strong preference for animation, big distinct chunks of color, etc. Generally speaking, the better graphics something had, the harder a time I had at making sense of it, so graphics had to be impressively awful for me to agree with those who cite graphics quality in their criticisms of things.

Shiny/sparkly things were great, but size kinda mattered. I couldn't really appreciate the difference between real and fake jewelry, visually speaking, but tiny gemstones were barely noticeable and generally just detracted from the clarity of whatever they were inlaid in, so in practice, this meant that fake won out because plastic and glass and quartz can be big enough, much more cheaply.

One thing I'd do sometimes was blink rapidly, to simulate random special effects, especially when there was more visual snow / lights being set off. I think the only time I can recall encountering any depiction of rapid blinking is from *Frog and Toad are Friends*, which is a children's book which I don't think I've encountered in any format other than Braille. (Wait, do frogs have transparent eyelids? Would that even do anything for them?)

Sometimes, when I was in water that was getting direct sunlight, and the reflection caught my eye, I would do things like splash or stir it up to watch how it affected the reflection. I kinda liked trying various ways of making splashes in general, because of how they looked and felt. (Like, striking downward with an open palm, and continuing to push after your hand breaks the surface creates a small cloud of tiny bubbles that almost feel like solid particles if they hit you. Keeping your hand half submerged and vibrating it back and forth, or maybe in a very tight, fast spiral motion, seemed kinda like an Energy Effect.)

A certain type of contrast in colors was helpful, so the decorations around Halloween and Christmas were generally much easier for me to deal with than, say, Easter (where things tend to get more ... pastelly?). Particularly indoors/at night, since Frosty the Snowman on a snowy day is a lot of pale-on-pale, but a Christmas tree in a room, covered in colorful lights and ornaments, has much more contrast). Put this together with the bits about animation, and you can probably imagine how the likes of Scooby Doo could have an impact out of proportion with how much I cared about the specifics (white, amorphous ghosts on dark backgrounds worked so well that I developed a consistent fantasia where certain words or ideas would give me a visualization of a ghost with a jacolantern floating at head-height beside it). I made a lot of audio recordings in elementary school based on dreams, and occasionally random ideas, and these involved a lot of ghosts (and Power Rangers, which has nothing to do with their very my-vision-friendly outfits, I'm sure).

Weirdly enough, glow-in-the-dark things rarely got much interest. Probably because of how remarkably dim most glow-in-the-dark things were. Things that would actually light up, though, were plenty nice. For some reason, they kept giving me those little pen-lights at the eye-doctors', which is how I discovered the limits to the opacity of human skin. Also, that place had interesting glass around one of the waiting rooms, where instead of a strip of metal dividing the panes, there was another, thick piece of glass extending inward, which either had a greenish tint, or resulted in one when looking through it at a certain angle. So I tended to look at those a lot.

I can't provide an image for reference, but I had an action figure of Marvel's Garrison Kane with his metal fan-weapon. I didn't know anything about the character, but I did know that spinning the fan while it caught the light just right was fascinating enough to prompt the imagination.

It actually took me a while to discover the eye-pushing-illusion-thing, so it's hard to say how much I did that.

I stared at the ground a lot, because that was where the most distinctive chunks of color often were, between parking lot lines, those red stripes in Wal-marts, and the little blue arrows in the hallway at my elementary school that were supposed to encourage people to walk on the right side of the hall (I had to stare at those for, like, months before I could see which way they were pointing, rather than just a blob of blue on white linoleum).

Yes. I poke my eyes sometimes. I also shake my head and sort of flap my hands around when I get nervous or excited. I can keep them under control for a short period if I need to but have never been able to stop doing it all together. All things considered, I don't think they've caused me near as many problems as people told me they would when I was a kid. I've just accepted the fact that they're part of me.