Ok so before I begin, I feel like I need to disclaim this pretty heavily beforehand. I know this can be a very sensitive topic for some, and I also know that there are people that feel they need to justify their eliteness by essentially hating on people who have fewer independence skills then the people in question, based on those people's perception. That is not what I aim to do here.

Rather, I aim to essentially start a discussion on the title topic: Where is the boundary, for people, between needing the environment to be adapted for them, or figuring out when that just isn't feasible and needing to figure out a workaround? And what gets in the way of doing the latter?

Also ...this one's rather long, so take a cup of coffee or (InsertFavoriteBevargeHere) and let's go.

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I myself went through several phases where this is concerned. For context, I am pretty much fully blind; I only have a bit of light perception which really only helps in a few edge cases and gets in the way of things more often than it actually helps.

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When I attended what we call "Special Education" here, so essentially blind school, these environments were still very sheltered. I have it on good authority that this has lessened quite a bit and that it's really only people with multiple disabilities that even end up in these schools for the most part these days, but I'm talking mid 90s. A lot has changed, and a lot has stayed the same, but I digress.

In this environment, being blind/visually impaired was the main staple of one's existence almost. You were catered to, in hindsight an almost belittling amount. Yes, people were able to keep up, and that is a good thing, but people who didn't need quite as much hand-holding had quite a bit of trouble in this environment; most teachers would sort of go in expecting the least amount possible, and therefore doing any more than the least amount possible would mean you were skipping ahead. This eventually culminated in me leaving the school for a so-called mainstream school; I tended to be done with the morning's activities in about an hour as opposed to the 3 I was supposed to take and had read half the fiction section of the braille library they had before that decision seemed the most prudent. I hear that these days, that hasn't really changed. People are encouraged to take their time, perhaps repeat a year if necessary, because don't forget that you have a disability, to carefully manage your expectations and your amounts of energy etc.

People who want to leave often don't get to, because the school says they don't think it's a good idea, and the parents, often not knowing any better, will go with what they deem to be authoritative advice. Tis a bit of a problem, at times.

Anyway, again, I digress. In primary school, even in mainstream school, that catering never really went away completely. I had a person in school who would sit with me privately and teach me things like topography using wooden puzzles with cut-outs of the various countries and continents. It wasn't until middle school where that changed.

I still had a person looking over my shoulder, and they would occasionally vouch for me, but they were more of a keeping-an-eye-outer who would frequently report to my parents rather than actually giving me private help like I'd gotten used to until that point. I will happily admit that at that point, I was rather entitled. I'd gotten used to people accomodating me and knew nothing about advocacy, figuring stuff out for myself if I ran into an accessibility issue etc.

The boat I did miss, where this kind of thing is concerned, is what often is referred to as the blind ghetto where my devices and assistive tech was concerned. Here, at the time, you got a braille display and laptop to do your schoolwork on, so I used that combination pretty much from the moment I left blind school and therefore had access to mainstream applications like MS Office, which helped my teachers immensely given they could use the tools they were used to. But yeah ... I was still in this mode of "People will take obstacles away from me when they happen and for the rest I just have to do what I can".

If something seemed impossible, it probably was, and if a subject seemed inherently impractical, I wouldn't want to take it. Couple that with teachers who really have no idea how to adapt things for me when they get too visuals, and problems start happening. I was getting to a point where following the road others were laying out for me was starting to fail, depending on others was starting to get me bad results, but it was all I knew how to do. It took several hard knocks to the head to start getting me out of that mindset, and it took several years, as well. A teacher that really wanted to help and was horrified that my excuse for not wanting to invest in certain subjects was "well ...because I'm blind". A girlfriend who felt like she had to be my mother in teaching me independence skills. A teacher in college who marked a question wrong after I asked in written form if that question could be covered orally given it was about an image without a description. Once this kind of mindset sets in, it can be an absolute b!tch to lose entirely. Indeed, even today, sometimes I need to closely examine my own hesitance or negligence about a certain topic or situation to see if this is triggering it. And I still see it everywhere around me, as well.

Guide dog schools here, for example, want prospective guide dog owners to have a number of standard routes that they often walk, ones they know well. My job and lifestyle make that a somewhat tricky requirement to meet; I don't have that many places I go to on a regular basis and my guide dog helps me most when I set my GPS to take me to an unknown location, but that makes me the odd one out. I'm supposed to be walking these by-road routes. Same goes for using newer tech to get a better handle on things like localizing yourself in your environment; there seems to be an almost reflexive need from o&m trainers to keep teaching, in quotes, "the old ways", citing the fact that tech might fail, that it isn't always going to be there. And while there is some truth to that, I see it being dropped to the wayside entirely in favor of asking others for help, which in my view really doesn't help all that much in feeling more independent. Over here this has gotten so bad that some trainers don't even really know about the advancements in this space; last year I was called in to teach a 60-year-old man how to use his cell phone as a GPS because I'm known to do this a lot and know more about it then the actual trainers. That kind of thing scares the heck out of me. I shouldn't know more then the people who teach other people to be the best they can be given their disability.

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And that , after a rather long-winded meander, takes me to my actual point.

What I see a lot of is people being crippled by this same hesitance, this same inability to do something if the road hasn't been pre-paved for them.

If you don't know a destination, you wait for an o&m person to teach you the route. If you can't play a board game, you get an expensive adapted version or you don't play it at all, rather than grabbing a person and adapting it for your use. If something has some kind of chance of failure, you don't do it until that chance of failure has been utterly eliminated or sufficiently minimized first. If a website doesn't work 100% with screenreaders, it is entirely inaccessible and cannot be used. If your eyes strain too much to perform a certain task, falling back to going completely screenreader-only or using your other senses just isn't an option.

You, here, is not directed at anyone, it's more of a "one".

People, myself at times included, seem to have this massive fear and hesitance of failure, of making mistakes, of not getting it the first time. We at times appear to be completely unable to just ... go try a thing to see how far we get, and I'm really curious if that is just me seeing that. Where is our initiative? Why can't more of us get up and go walk around outside and learn from the times we get lost, rather than dread it happening? I am going to walk around my neighborhood later today. I know some of it, but I'm going to go places I haven't been for over a year because of covid. Just ...because I can. Because I will probably get lost, and because hey, I might learn about a couple new streets while I'm figuring out my way back home when I do :)

Really curious what others weigh in on this one :)