I don’t want to see any magical blind people. No, we don’t have any superpowers. We don’t see more clearly about people below the surface because we can’t look at them.
Blind people are just as judge mental, harsh, and critical as everybody else.
I also don’t want to see somebody who has a guide dog. Not many blind people actually have a guide dogs, at least among my friends.
I do want to see that character
Being independent
Going places on their own
Living on their own without assistance
Portrayed as more than just the stereo typical blind person who only talks about their disability

We're. not helpless, nor are we superheroes. Most of us are just normal people living normal lives. Most of us have some vision - it's a spectrum and a pretty broad one at that. Not everyone who is blind just has poor visual acuity. There are tons of ways our vision is affected beyond acuity; depth perception, visual disturbances, photosensitivity, lack of contrast sensitivity, central vision loss, peripheral vision loss, colorblindness, night blindness, nystagmus, ocular migraines, etc. etc.

Not everyone who's blind uses a cane, and not everyone who does use one uses it all the time. Only a small percentage of us have guide dogs and not all of us want them.

Blind people with some functional vision may choose to still use a cane if they lack depth perception, have a narrow field of view, are sensitive to light, can't see in the dark, or simply for ID purposes, so others cut us some slack if we accidentally step in front of or bump into them (and so they hopefully don't run over us).

Not all of us know braille and for a lot of people, it's possible to get by without it these days. People who were blind from birth are a lot more likely to know braille than someone who lost their vision later in life or someone who's on the upper end of the " blindness spectrum.

We don't all wear sunglasses, either.

The longer your character's been blind, the less they will struggle with things. If your character's been blind since birth, they'll probably be pretty good at it.

Most of us who've been at this for a bit learn our way around our homes and common spaces we visit pretty quickly, including common routes we take to get to those spaces. We've figured out (perhaps through training, perhaps through just doing it) basic life skills like cooking and doing laundry and tidying up a room... or the more complex stuff, like raising children. So you shouldn't write us into situations where we're struggling to do basic human things.

Most of us have normal interests and normal hobbies.

Some of us are pretty tech-savvy, because there's a lot of technology out there that makes the world more accessible to us and similarly, jobs that require skills like computer use are some of the more accessible jobs to us (e.g. I'm a software engineer).

Our other senses like hearing and smell aren't magically better than other people's, we're just used to paying more attention to them, but it's nothing that anybody couldn't do if they tried.

Show us living a normal life beyond just being “a blind person. “Like talking about us going to the movies, playing sports, going shopping, being in a relationship, etc.

What everyone else said. Going by my personal experience today, if you want to refer to the disability, just have her fall asleep on the couch in the middle of a netflix show one evening, and complain about being exhausted all the time... it's like doing two jobs.

Of course for that to work she does have to actually have a job and a life and interests and go through 90 per cent of her week without thinking about the disability.

Possibly good things to include

- know what the eye condition is specifically. Lots of different things can cause visual impairment, even a combination of things. Figuring out exactly what medical diagnosis or a combination of things the character has will make a world of difference writing for them accurately.

- as an extension from the above, the experience of being VI varies a lot by the condition that they have. The experience of a visual impairment varies a lot by what causes it. What makes them unable to see? Floaters? Blurriness? Shaky eyes? Too much light? is the brain not processing visual input? This is also really important for your research. It allows you to find accurate depiction of the exact eye condition you’re trying to learn about. Otherwise you might end up getting the wrong information. It’s not a question of, what is it like to be blind/VI? The better question to ask yourself is, what is it like to have ___(specific condition that causes blindness/VI).

- in the modern day, a lot of low vision blind people use assistive technology. Find out what kind of technology the character will be using in their daily life, if any, if it matters. A lot of people who are visually impaired might just have larger text settings. It might not even matter for the story.

- You don’t necessarily have to go into detail about things. If it doesn’t serve a purpose to the story, you can probably just gloss over it.


Things to avoid:

- other senses may not necessarily be enhanced. Common myth

- Most visually impaired people don’t use braille.

- we generally don’t have to feel around in familiar environments. Once you know where everything is, it’s pretty easy to navigate.

- No face feeling

- best not to give her any sort of super powers, unless you have a fantasy setting in which everyone already has super powers, or if it’s the focus of the story.

- don’t describe her vision in a way that sounds bad enough that she wouldn’t be able to drive, but allow her to be able to drive for plot convenience. can she drive? Look up laws in her location and compare to her vision to determine whether she can drive. This is huge. It impacts your career, social life, and where you live. If you don’t wanna get into all that, that’s fine! but make her vision good enough to drive. It would be inconsistent to give her bad enough vision to where she struggles with everything, runs into things constantly, needs all that assistive tech, is significantly affected even with corrected vision, yet somehow can drive no prob.

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Despite how often it shows up in media, we don’t touch people’s faces to know what they look like. I’ve never heard of an actual blind person actually wanting to do that.

You don’t have to avoid words like look or see when talking to a blind person, and we watch TV just like everyone else (we’re still doing the same act of taking in entertainment or information that a sighted person is doing when they watch TV).

We aren’t helpless. And we aren’t amazing people for doing normal tasks successfully. We live independently, get around independently, have jobs, raise children, &c. But there is an unemployment and underemployment problem faced by blind people, where lots of us struggle to find good work.

I’d suggest researching the specific eye condition your character has, and find out the struggles and adaptations faced by those with that specific condition. For example, I’m incredibly light sensitive and wear sunglasses to compensate. Others may have more difficulty in low light, and be always looking to make things brighter to make use of vision they do have. Also, most blind people don’t wear sunglasses all the time, though they may have glasses to improve what vision they can.

Most blind people don’t have a guide dog. They may or may not have a cane, and may not always use it (I don’t use my cane in familiar surroundings, or low light, for example). A smartphone is a great accessibility tool, with a built in screen reader and apps for navigation, magnifying, colour identification, reading text, &c.

We’re not helpless.

It depends on the cause of the vision loss, but 90% of people with vision loss have some vision.

While some clients can learn echolocation, it's generally a pretty rare skill. In ten years, I've only ever met two people who can use echolocation well (and even then, they still used a white cane).

Touching the face to learn about people is a fairly outdated perception. Perhaps if someone is very intimate (like boyfriend/girlfriend), but not really used with strangers anymore.

Nowadays, there are a lot activities that can be done by people with vision loss. Either things can be adapted, or accessible technology is built in (for examples, iPhones come with VoiceOver built into it).

We don't have super natural sense of hearing or smell.

Although there are a few younger kids that developed eco location skills,