First off, I am not blind or visually impaired. I'm just a teacher for the visually impaired. I don't and won't ever pretend to know what it's like to be in your shoes.

From my experience, which is just teaching, location is a huge factor. I live in a small town and advocate for different technologies and no one has a clue what I'm talking about.

They can't tell you how to access accessibility options on a computer or an iPhone. They've never heard VoiceOver. The first time I heard of JAWS was in a doctor's office and NVDA was from a research project I did myself in grad school.

So yeah, I'm not surprised by your post. And it 100% does not make you a bad person for getting annoyed.

You aren't in anyway a bad person. I am not blind but do a bunch of work in web accessibility and I'd say probably like 80% of my colleagues really didn't know about this stuff at all until maybe 1-2 years ago (and these are people actively working in fields of tech). The fact that so few people have any clue about it is mind boggling to me.

I don’t think it makes you a bad person. I think it’s all about how you handle the situation more than anything. Even I get pretty exhausted answering the same questions over and over that people could simply just Google. I kind of feel like people choose to not educate themselves on these sorts of topics because it’s irrelevant to them. Hang in there though, I can understand your frustrations!

Do not feel bad, but as the others mentioned it’s still not well-known. I’m living in the country which is hailed as one of the best tech-adopter, and yet many people still have no idea about screen readers.

I think new update from Microsoft office did a good job, they clearly display “alt-text” wording for every pic to be filled. Inclusive future is still far but the progress is there.

I get annoyed too, but you have to remember those outside of the blindness space know nothing about how a blind person does anything. If you were to ask a random person on the street what a screen reader was, they would have no clue what you are talking about. I wish I had a way to fix this, but I get tired of explaining this to people as well.

When people question me about my ability to use the internet, I just think what the FUCK, do you really think blind people just sit silently in an empty room doing nothing??

No, you aren’t a bad person. I think most sighted people just can’t grasp what we deal with daily, and it blows their mind. I always get “so what CAN you see??”, “how do you read online??”, “how are you texting me if you’re blind??” It can get tiresome, but I try to remember that most people can’t wrap their heads around not having 20/20 vision (or close to it).

[deleted]

You're not alone. It's annoying to answer it constantly.

Yes it gets boring, yes I keep doing it anyway. I've got a million and one ways of changing the subject quickly. I don't mind answering the question but let's not have the whole evening end up being about sight stuff, you know?

The thing is, in the end it's really bad for people to sit there with burning questions wanting to ask stuff and not feeling like they can. That's what makes it seem mysterious and weird when really it isn't. It's a pain in the ass, but it's not particularly mysterious, I'm sure you would agree. And personally, I just grit my teeth and get my phone to say something to them, then I change the subject.

I'm one of these sighted people and asks a lot of questions out of curiosity. It's because of most sighted people like me don't know better, wants to learn and not make false assumptions. Often when I'm guessing, the made up answers may be wrong. When I get answered, I knows better. So, we don't mean any bad with it.

On the other side I can understand you getting tired of answering the same questions all the times. I gets tired of answering people on why I know a Scandinavian language, belongs to a Scandinavian country and all that - but still not being white. Answering other Scandinavians on why not all Scandinavian people are white gets tiring because of it's the same question getting repeated a lot.

When it comes to technology specifically touch screen phone's people assume that the only way that you can use a touch screen phone is with sight and when they see you a blind person using one it doesn't make sense to them.