Mikmoomamimocki wrote: ↑Sun Jan 01, 2023 4:34 am Yo! Have you always been blind? This is a dumb question, but if you had normal sight at some point, do you think your hearing and stuff is better? You’ve mentioned having partial vision, but do you still have to rely on sound?

For your blindness is it like you can’t see fine details at all? or is it something else? Can you look at a photo and tell what it is generally? I’m just curious how the partial blindness works.

No, I've not always been blind. Retinitis-Pigmentosa is a degenerative condition, meaning that it develops (degenerates) over time as you age. One of the first symptoms an RP patient will run into is lack of night vision. I have absolutely no concept of what it's like to have night vision since I lost that at such a young age. Only reason I know is because my parents told me I would scream and cry as a baby any time I was in a dark room, and the monent they'd turn on a light I'd stare at it for hours. This is common behaviour among patients with this condition, or so I've heard.

You don't generally develop better senses from losing others, it doesn't work that way. You just learn to use your other senses to compensate. For example, in the dark, I can usually hear if I'm walking next to a wall because I can feel the subtle change in sound and air pressure. It's extremely subtle but I'm sure you could pick up on it too if you paid close attention to it.

I do still have to rely on sound in a lot of cases, I explained this earlier. It's difficult for me to keep my eyes from shaking involuntarily (this is a secondary condition that develops in RP patients later in life, mine is severe), which makes reading extremely difficult for me. If I didn't have shaky eyes, I still have enough vision to read these forum posts as long as it's in dark mode and heavily zoomed in. But because of the eye shaking, I'm forced to use a screen reader if I want to actually understand the words I'm reading.

When it comes to images/photos, it depends. If it's text, I generally can't read it for the same reason I can't read these forum posts without a screen reader/TTS voice. If it's anything else, it needs to be extremely obvious what's in the image or you'll have to point things out to me. Picking on MattKC again, I could look at his face and see enough detail to recognize him as MattKC, but I couldn't actually describe what he looks like. Show me a picture of a PCB and I'll know what it is, but couldn't tell you at all what traces/components/chips are on it or what that PCB actually came from. I also couldn't tell you if it was clean or dirty unless it was something obvious like it being ABSOLUTELY COVERED in battery juice.

Some additional notes:

• The threshold for legal blindness in Canada is a visual acuity of 20/200 in your best eye. As of 2018, my best eye was 20/400. The higher the second number, the worse.
• Normal human visual acuity is 20/20, meaning that you must be 20 feet away from something a normal human can see from 20 feet away. As of 2018, I need to stand 20 feet away from an object a normal human can see from 400 feet away.
• I have a blind spot in the DIRECT center of my right eye where no light is actually visible to me. It doesn't appear black, the brain just fills it in based on what's around it. It appears as a tiny cloud of color, but it's just in the right spot to make that eye useless for reading.