Audio based entertainment is solid. I can recommend some of my favorite Audiodramas if you're interested. Audio books are always good too.

Handful of accessible videogames are an option. Try out "The Vale: Shadow of the Crown". It's a 100% audio based game. There are no visuals. You play as a blind protagonist navigating a fantasy rpg.

A social hobby like Dungeons and Dragons is an option. There are lots of folks dedicated to making accessible D&D material. It can be played in person or online.

Meetups in your area are a good way to meet people and spend time. You can find meetups dedicated to hobbies, book clubs, or general hangouts for your demographic.

What a great question, I hope you find some replies to be directly helpful. :). I lost the ability to work a year before the pandemic, and burned through a lot of my go-to activities by summer 2020. Then I was casting about for more options, so this list will sound pretty nutty.

* Hello Fresh plus Gordon Ramsay tutorials on YouTube to get safe kitchen skills back

* downloaded heaps of ebooks from MyAnonaMouse, they had a really solid selection of accessible formats

* started a YouTube channel and connected with heaps of other visually impaired and legally blind creators

* experimenting with the supplies in my art studio and adapting them to the way I need to work now

* gardening during the warm months, working with my hands is really therapeutic, plus botany and entomolgy are fun add-ons

* got a Nintendo Switch console to play games on my 40" monitor, folks with much less vision than me like Ross Minor can play a selection of games using custom patches for accessibility

* switched over to Apple, Windows and Android were just not working for me

* watching academic psychology channels on YouTube in subjects that really interest me

* getting my feet wet with livestreaming on Twitch using OBS

* signed up for SkillShare to learn ukulele, tin whistle, trumpet, guitar, plus music production software like Garage Band and LogiPro, plus art classes using ProCreate on iPad; I have to adapt some things for my level of vision but make sure to keep it enjoyable

* listening to entirely too much true crime, including expanded content on Patreon to the ones I really like

* got a subscription for Audible, it's really enjoyable to hear a voice actor rather than a synthetic voice for fiction imo

* plans in the works to start studying Braille, and Spanish

I feel kind of cuckoo for this list, but before this I was working in laboratories and in pharmacy, thanks to a B. Sc. Spec. in Environmental Biology. It's been a struggle to get back on my feet from everything.
I have heard a number of visually impaired folks mention they code using Python.

For me the breakthrough was learning to live in the moment. Sure, there are ways to occupy my time. Jogging, cooking, Reddit, but losing my job meant losing my sense of purpose. I felt the world was passing me by.

I didn't feel necessary anymore.

After struggling to believe any imagined narrative in which the world still needed me I finally got the courage to accept my new reality. I stopped measuring myself by promotions and respect of my coworkers. I quit trying to get the high score and instead I just appreciated the little details in the game we call life.

I started having fun instead of trying to win.

$1 plays a big part of it. So does my weekly urban explorer outing and our weekends at the dance club. But it's not so much the things I do, it's the head space I'm in.

Appreciate the little things. Enjoy the moment. Accept the moment and appreciate it for what it is and the beauty it holds. Give yourself permission to just be you. You don't need to be productive today, spend the day walking barefoot on the grass. Feel it tickle your feet, smell it and enjoy it like you did when you were a little child.

When you get into that head space the whole world becomes magical.

Could you volunteer, help people out, I would go on line and answer question, do tech support for free, network. That’s actually how I found this job. Help researchers. There’s a group that sure could do with people helping them on facebook or a fair few tech support groups. Some social groups maybe you can help in other ways?

I spent a lot of time online, reading books, learning things.

Pursued hobbies.


Find hobbies and interest you’d like to do and invest time in them.

Do you like learning languages then learn a language. And you can use online and social media.

Do you like to learn to code then learn how to code

Do you like to do art and bead then do that.

Do you like music and singing spend time doing that.

Do you like tinkering with software or hardware. Then do that.

Any hobby pick one and start doing it. Or pick many. Get involved with online and offline groups. There’s a group for everything.

Is there a place where you go to volunteer, soup kitchen, animal shelter, women’s shelter or other places?

I'm totally blind and code all day every day. At the moment I'm making a MineCraft-like voxel world for the Raspberry Pi 4 and 400 in Rust and assembly on bare metal, that is, without an operating system, like in the old days of MS-DOS when games just took control of the entire system, but with modern technology. It's still in a very early stage, but I can already talk to the GPU to allocate a frame buffer and print stuff to the screen. The next step is to start using virtual memory to make allocations easier with contiguous addresses, take advantage of CPU cache, and prevent myself from accidentally writing to reserved memory areas that I shouldn't.

I did learn to code with sight, but have been slowly challenging myself since 2019 after a 5 year break from coding due to going blind, and feel like I'm pushing the envelope of what is possible to do as a blind programmer. I can't work because, as I came here to ask, I couldn't read a simple ASCII diagram to save my life, plus I struggle a lot to read other people's code with this condition. Still I keep training myself both because I love this stuff as well as because I hope to one day make myself an asset to anyone who demonstrates interest in hiring me.

After writing a rather depressing post a few days ago, today I feel the best I felt since going blind, because this makes me recall the days in the early 2000s when I had fun porting the Linux kernel to an embedded platform with two friends, as those were some of the best days of my life,

Disclaimer that I live in Australia and services here are decent. I'm wanting to work or get an internship as part of my degree, but not having much luck.

I volunteer 1 day per week at Vision Australia - would do more, but that's all that's needed so far. I study online part-time. I go to an exercise physio every Friday and sometimes other social outings.

Other than that, I help out with cooking or occasionally baking, listen to audiobooks and podcasts, listen to YouTube videos sometimes and play D&D online with my partner and our friends.

Read. It's my favorite passtime. Audiobooks, braille, e-books, whatever you prefer. Also you could enroll in a course or two on EdX.org. A lot of them are free and if you pay a little you can get a certificate for it.

Podcasts and fishing

I can’t really help with going out, I can do it but I don’t have that many roots, but I go on YouTube, Reddit, listen to podcasts, Play some video games, that kind of stuff.

I am a student, but since I' not in school right now, I am constantly keeping myself busy with learning new pieces for piano. Recently, I received a Lyre as a gift, so I've been learning tunes on that, too. I play multiple instruments; my main ones being the Irish whistle, piano, and I sing. So, in short, playing music keeps me sane.

Body weight exercises at home.

A lot of people will give you ideas on how to kill time which is fine, but my attitude is, if you don't have the O and M skills to get out and do stuff then you have a very good way to use up time. Learn routes, do new things, meet new people. Being bored comes from sitting at home and not having to sit at home comes from practising ways not to do that. Yes it sucks and it's horrible and nobody likes doing it but honestly, if you're not busy, and you're not busy because it feels like you don't have the ability to be busy, then you pretty much have a job already.

Is there really nobody you can call to get some more experience going places and doing things? Even if not I'd really encourage you to figure things out. If you have decent cane skills you are way ahead of a lot of people. Maybe you'll even figure out you can actually work!

I hang out on reddit and the r/blind discord, read, watch TV, work on my braille when I can, plus I have housework and a baby that I have to take care of. But I also still just feel stuck inside at times and need to figure out some of this myself.

I spend far too much time on here. Play music. Play the guitar. Read a lot of stuff. Documentaries. Podcasts. Learning materials.