Hey, ignorance is fine, Mockingbird -
If someone really wants to know this shit I have no problem answering questions. Prejudice and flat line ignorance that couldn't even conceive that there might be solutions to get around the eyesight problem is what makes me feel sorry for people, that's the sad bit.

Look up "screen reader" on the interwebs if you're really interested on how the blind folks do computers. In my case, VoiceOver on the mac. It is a speaky text to speech thing, yeah. It's annoying only when you aren't used to it.
To answer your other question - I have no sight in my left eye and only some spotty peripheral in the right, about three percent I suppose of what would be "normal", difficult to say. I have what is termed as under 3/60 vision - i.e. I have to be closer than three feet to something to see it than a normally sighted person could see at sixty feet. Under that "line" there is no real diagnostic tool to figure out how bad it is, it's all seen medically as pretty much the same, until you get to "no light perception" (i.e. totally black out blind, which is what my fiance is).
In my case, I have to be about six inches away from an object about the size of your hand to actually notice it, but I still can't see the object clearly. Anything smaller is pretty much invisible. When I get my eyes tested (happens alot, oddly enough) they do it by waving their hands in front of my face at the distance of about six inches to see if I can tell what they're doing, which seems to be a medically recognised method, lol. I grew up with normal sight, lost the big chunk of it in my early twenties.

"Partially sighted" is a term not used much anymore (except by people who don't have experience of the same ;) ), due to it being so vague as to be useless. Someone who you might consider "partially sighted" (i.e. not black out blind) can need exactly the same assistive shit as someone totally blind, if their vision is very very poor. The current in vogue terms seem to be "sight impaired" (meaning the old "partially sighted") and "severely sight impaired" (which means anything from totally blind to my sort of eyesight to anything in between and somewhat better). Everyone is different, t'is the thing. Whatever the fuck it's called makes no odds to me - I have given up trying to explain my "percentage" of left over vision to all but those who are genuinely interested (as you seem to be.)

So, there you go.
(womanwhocanonlylivewithdogs, Sat 3 Apr 2010, 11:07, Reply)