I have done that with friends of people I've worked with, and done basic cane travel with them. In my defence, under those controlled circumstances, when we have a purpose and they're getting a specific experience out of it then I think it can be good. Often it's brought a bit of fun to the situation which can be in short supply. I don't think those people ended up feeling weak or bad, usually they end up going "oh, right I get it." It needs to be directed properly and have a specific goal in mind.

Obviously, having a bunch of people just blindfold themselves and try to do stuff is going to be a waste of time. I have said to people when they have been whining about stuff they can't do, "well, you don't know what you're doing yet." When they get some idea what they're doing, it's different. I think we all understand that.

Also, to get political, this is the same NFB that protested the movie "Blindness." The film shows a situation in which huge numbers of people go blind all at once. NFB complained that it didn't realistically depict the day to day lives of blind people, but it's pretty obviously not trying to. It's trying to depict the initial trauma that they're talking about in that paper and it does that pretty reasonably. If huge numbers of people suddenly went blind and nobody knew what they were doing it would not be pretty.

I don't think you can hold both those views simultaneously without a bit of cognitive dissonance. If blindfolding people is bad because going blind is scary, what's wrong with the movie being scary?

Carrie Sandhal is a Disability Studies and Theatre scholar who has a book of essays that are really good, one is the account of a woman who works with blind colleagues closely and has had to feign blindness to do things like help them transport service animals, etc. As the society we live in is largely responsible for our disablement and not our visual impairment, it's posited that presenting as blind in public with a cane or service animal and sunglasses and dealing with public reactions to "blindness" would provide a more accurate picture of our experience than blindfolding. Especially because it's not like most of us just have zero ocular sensory input...

You know how we're always telling sighted people to not blindfold themselves to try and understand what it's like to be us? There's a research study from a peer reviewed journal backing up that it's a bad idea! I thought y'all would appreciate this.