daredevilkink | Discussion/Off-Topic Post #1

I thought maybe we could have a post like the Ask a New Yorker post, but about blindness or accessibility for the blind.

Like, if anyone has any questions or if there are people on here who are blind/know blind people/work with people who are blind, etc, and would like to share tips, then we can all discuss them here. :-)

YES PLEASE

Christine Ha's 'Blind Life' videos might help a little. Here's one about email, twitter, and blogging
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_OO9w_oK6dQ
She also has one about putting on makeup, for rule 63 fics

she is so awesome! Definitely gonna start tuning into that

Some people on Tumblr have made a couple of relevant text posts about the assistive technology Matt uses:

http://cliffnotesofanerd.tumblr.com/post/119791664463/fellow-daredevil-fic-writers

http://mcrvels.tumblr.com/post/118421167750/a-little-masterpost-of-the-blind-assistive-tech

Hey, I'm part of a student group in my university (it's a disability self-advocacy group) and approximately one third of the board is blind. The one who is not is, um, me.

Obviously, this doesn't REMOTELY make me an expert on blind people. It makes me someone who knows, is friends with, works with, and has spent three days in a hotel room with two blind people. So obviously I can only talk about my experiences with them as a sighted person.

Things that might be helpful for fic writers to know:

- Blind people don't run into stuff all the time. I mean, guys. Seriously. Just because a blind person doesn't have superpowers doesn't mean they're suddenly accident prone and can barely find their way around. There's a reason there are canes and guide dogs. (One of my friends uses a guide dog and one of them uses a cane.) They generally keep you from actively running into stuff.

- Yes, people trip over the canes all the time.

- Echolocation is actually a thing some blind people use. Generally not a whole lot, but there can be the occasional clicking noise with your mouth to figure out where a wall is.

- Don't talk to guide dogs when they're on harness, seriously. Or pet them. Geez.

- At least when my friends first meet people, they don't immediately know who it is who is speaking after the first meeting. (One of them is NLP, the other has at least some light perception.) So, yeah, it's not weird for a blind person to ask "who is this?" if you haven't met them many times and you just start talking. It's generally a good idea to go, "Hey, it's [Your Name]." if they don't recognize you from your voice. Especially since, like. It's not that easy to recognize people from their voice.

- My friend who is NLP has been since birth. He says that, just like sighted people are sometimes immediately attracted to someone on sight, he is occasionally immediately attracted to someone when he hears them speak. He calls it "cute voice syndrome".

- People stare a lot.

- What Karen does in the first episode, when she takes off her shirt in front of Matt? Yeah, that's not all that unrealistic. I've definitely done that before.

- I'm pretty sure Foggy has the wrong idea about guide dogs--they aren't magically perfectly effective, there are pros and cons to them just like there are to using a cane. They're highly trained, it's hard to get one, and they're still, you know, dogs, so they're not always magically on point. There was an entire night where the friend who uses a guide dog had her heel and just held onto my elbow because his guide dog kept trying to run him into walls.

- My blind friends can't perceive colors. They have definitely helped me choose something to wear before. (It was business casual day, okay, and I didn't know what I could wear, so I just described my skirt, tights, and the color of my t-shirt, and handed off my t-shirt to one of the guys so that he could feel the material and see if it was appropriate.)

- Something that helps with accessibility: when a blind person wants to know where something is on a table, sometimes you can just tap the thing or something to help them find it. I generally do that by knocking on a table or chair with my fist.

Thaaank you this is really helpfull!!!

This is really helpful, thank you!

Discussion/Off-Topic Post #1

On blindness & accessibility

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