There is a difference between being blind and totally blind. Being legally blind starts at 20/200 vision and worse and totally blind it’s pretty much self-explanatory. You see absolutely nothing. Some people use canes and others use guide dogs. I personally don’t like canes so I have a guide dog. As far as discrimination goes, I don’t get it often but I get pushed back from having my dog in restaurants, in stores, etc. In theUnited States there is not much anyone can do about it, except if the dog is out of control then I could be forced to leave

Well, for starters a lot of people who are considered blind (at least where I come from) don’t use any mobility aids (for example: someone can have 20% of vision left but use it better than someone who has 50% of their vision left, this is from my experience as a legally blind person). You can use that if your character is legally blind. I also use built in Windows screen reader in some cases because I don’t need it all the time, usuqlly I just enlarge the text on the screen.
Regarding discrimination, I can’t speqk for completely blind people, but I have experienced being called a liar and for wanting attention. At school a lot of my teachers also refused to give me tests and other subject related materials and also to give me some more time to write my test or to have more oral exams bacause according to them I was doing very well without those and also other students would be jealous. Also, when I go for a walk eith my parents, if we met someone who we know, they would never adress me if they wanted to ask me something, they would ask my parents lik I don’t know how to communicate. And to top this whole section off, when I was in elementary school, a lot of children and their parents believed I was retarded because one of my eyes turns inwards toward my nose when I look ahead.
Regarding grief, I’m very sad because I can’t dedicate my life to majority of college degrees because of my vision. My biggest dream was to become a nurse or a doctor but I have no chance there because of my vision problems.
Another struggle I forgot to mention is that, at least for me, two years ago, doctors never wanted to explain what’s wrong with me. They would literally say “Oh, it’s jut her thing. It’s nothing bad”, but because of my supportive and very stubborn parents, I was finally diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa which runs in my family.
Also a great challenge for me is to get my family zo accept me for who I am. My father is devastated and now sais sorry to me every day because he didn’t want to understand my vision problems and always compared me to my sister.
I hope this helped, good luck with your book😊

Send me your questions via DM and I’ll try to get back to you at some point tomorrow. I’m on mobile at the moment, so it’d be difficult for me to write proper responses and I don’t want to “shortchange” you on information.