#writing blind characters

[blindbeta]

Would it be offensive to draw a blind characters with different colored pupils as a visual cue for their blindness? I don't want to perpetuate any harmful stereotypes, but I also want it to be clear that one of the characters in my webcomic is blind.

If this person has cataracts, infection of the cornea, or some other reason that one or both of their eyes are that way, that would probably be fine. However, not all blind people have eyes that look noticeably different without a reason as to why, even as cataracts are common causes of blindness. Contrary to popular belief, not all blind people have cloudy eyes.

I wonder if people are looking for cloudy eyes when they say we don’t look blind . . .

Generally, unless there is a reason your character would have noticeably different eyes, there is probably no need to draw them any differently.

You may instead enjoy finding other creative ways to show their blindness. Maybe they use a cane or other assistive devices. Maybe they use Braille or large print. Maybe they read regular print with frequent breaks and eye massaging.

Generally, ask yourself if you are making choices because they feel right or because there is a solid reason behind them. In this case, are you drawing a character with cataracts or did you unintentionally fall into the idea that blind people’s eyes just look different.

The point is that some blind people do have noticeably blind eyes due to discoloration or cloudiness. However, when drawing blind characters, consider why you are drawing them that way. Be intentional.

I hope this helps. Good luck with your comic!

#blind #blind characters #writing blind characters #cloudy eyes #drawing blind characters

[askablindperson]

Hello, I am a writer who wants to write about a character with Lebers Congenital Amaurosis, and I’ve been struggling to find resources or descriptions on what vision is like for people with that condition. If you’re okay with it, could you describe what vision is like for you? Thank you and have a wonderful day! And sorry if you’ve already been asked this a million times.

Hi! Thank you for asking, and I would be glad to answer. I know what you mean, too. LCA is still somewhat common in the blind community, but I have also found quite a lack of resources to explain how it works to other folks. LCA is rarely included in any of those blindness simulation filters, either, though those also aren’t perfect representations.

A quick disclaimer: most of what I will share here is based on my own personal experience as well as the other blind people with LCA I have personally met in the trends I have observed in the community. I’m not a medical professional though, and I really don’t know that much about how these things pan out statistically Speaking.

First, one thing you should know is that LCA is progressive. It tends to be very slow and steady about it, and it took me 10 years to notice that I had had a significant change in vision which I only fully noticed in the last few months, but it is progressive, so it will inevitably get worse over a person’s lifetime. It just might take its sweet time getting there, and you won’t notice any overnight changes. at least not in the folks I’ve known, or in myself, or in most of the literature I’ve seen discussing it. There may be outliers though that I am less aware of.

The other thing I will say is that most of the other blind folks I have known with LCA actually have significantly less vision than I do, usually being born with little more than light perception and often losing what’s left of that light perception within their first few years of childhood. so a lot of them are totally blind as adults, or still only have light and shadow perception.

As for mine, at least in my experience, I seem to be somewhat of an outlier in LCA, in that I’m quite a high partial case. I believe I’ve been at least legally blind since birth, meaning my visual acuity was at least 20/200 or worse with some visual field issues also, but I’ve always had quite a lot more residual vision than most of the other folks with LCA I have met personally. Not all of them though. When I was a young child, my visual acuity was probably around the 20/200 Marc, but now at 27, my better eye is at about 20/650 and the worst eye is somewhere in the ballpark of 20/5000. Don’t ask me how they can even measure it when it gets that severe lol.

In practical terms, the way I have always described my vision is that it’s a lot like looking through a fogged up mirror when you get out of the shower, a foggy window in the winter, or the super blurred out background in a movie. You can make out plenty of shapes and colors and lights, and you can get a vague sense of what a lot of objects might be, but there is no detail and it’s extremely blurred out. if you happen to wear glasses, I often say that it’s like a lot of folks without their glasses on, but amped up to 11, and that’s even WITH my glasses. Without them, it’s even blurrier, though I don’t really wear glasses much anymore.

That description is in reference to my better eye, mind you. The worst one is so much worse that I can rarely make out actual objects with it or even silhouettes of people. It’s still colorful and everything, but the blurriness is significantly worse to the point that the eye isn’t really useful.

For me personally, as I have gotten older, my central vision has actually deteriorated a little bit faster than my peripheral vision, so I can ironically see a little clearer out of the corners of my eyes then I can looking straight ahead. I don’t know how common this is amongst folks with LCA, especially since most of the folks I know only have light and shadow perception where it’s harder to measure that, But that’s how it is for mine. It wasn’t like that as a child, I would have considered my central and peripheral vision to be fairly similar most of my life, but in the last 10 years, my central vision is noticeably worse now than my peripheral. if I look at a ceiling light through the corner of my eye, and then shift my eye so I’m looking at that same ceiling light to the center of my eye, it is instantly blurrier, like a little foggy film was put over it.

Also, at least for me, I have quite a few blind spots in my vision that impact my overall visual field. Contrary to what those vision loss simulation filters will have you believe though, those are not represented by black spots or white spots in real life. They’re just gone. Think of it sort of like Photoshopping somebody out of a picture. If they are standing in your blind spot, it’s not that there’s a blob over top of them, it’s as if that section of the picture was just cut out, and the two halves around it smashed together as if that part was never there. It’s just missing.

In actuality, everybody has a blind spot, even people with no vision problems whatsoever, so you may be able to get a better understanding of this by researching the general Blindspot that everyone has. I just have more of them because pieces of my retina have completely deteriorated and died off from my disorder.

The discussion of central versus peripheral vision and the blind spots applies to both of my eyes, but like above, just a lot more severe in the eye that’s worse. It’s not quite to the point where it only has light and shadow perception, but it’ll probably get there in the next 10 years or so. I’ve never leaned very heavily on that eye because it’s always been the much weaker one, but these days it is a little bit funny to see just how wildly different the exam for my right eye is compared to my left eye nowadays.

Lastly though, that does finish up the description of what my vision actually looks like, but I do want to leave you with one final note of consideration, which is not to focus overly hard on exactly what your character sees when writing them. At the end of the day, most of us who have been blind our entire lives don’t really go about our days actively paying attention to exactly what we can see and what we can’t, or thinking about what things look like through our eyes at that moment in time. We’re just living our lives with the vision we have, because we were born this way so it’s our normal, and sometimes focusing on it too much in the writing can cloud the characterization more than it helps.

All of that said, I do hope that this provides a useful framework. Mostly, my vision is just ridiculously blurry and really only gets a tiny bit less blurry with glasses, with a few holes punched here and there for good measure lol. To be honest, when I’m spending time with other blind people, we don’t actually usually spend all that much time describing exactly what each other’s vision looks like to each other or anything—it’s usually not exactly the most interesting thing we want to talk about—so I don’t know how common my specific details are to others with LCA. But that’s pretty much the long and short of my personal experience, and hopefully it can be useful when understanding your character.

#ask a blind person #actually blind #ActuallyBlind #writing blind characters #Leber congenital amaurosis #blind #blindness #writing disabled characters

[whumpinggrounds]

Writing Blind/Low Vision Characters

Time for another one of these I have decided! As always, this is based on personal experience with blind low vision people, classwork, and research. I do wear glasses, but I am not blind/low vision and this is not my lived experience. Please feel free to question, correct, and comment, as long as you are respectful! Thanks so much for reading :) On to the good stuff!

Vocab

Blind describes a person who has very little to no vision. This can be written with a lowercase or capital b (blind or Blind). Blind does not always mean no vision. It is medically defined as having vision of less than 20/200 in the better eye. Someone can be able to distinguish color, light and dark, or shapes, and still be blind.

blind refers to the medical condition of having little to no vision.

Blind (note the capital b) refers to the sociocultural experience of being a nonseeing person in a predominantly vision-based society. This distinction is newer and less common than with the Deaf community, but is becoming more popular, particularly with DeafBlind people. As always, the important thing is respecting what people identify as and want to be called

Visually impaired is a term that covers the spectrum of vision differences.

The term does not include disorders that affect one or more of the “basic psychological processes.” What this means is that though vision or the use of visual information may be impaired, if the nature of that impairment is not related to the structure of the eye, it would not be described as “visual impairment.” Examples include perceptual disabilities, brain injuries, or dyslexia.

B/VI is an acronym, standing for Blind/Visually Impaired, that can be used to refer to the community as a whole.

Low vision describes a person who is not fully blind, but whose level of vision is significantly impaired. More technically, this refers to vision that cannot be corrected through medical or surgical procedures, or conventional eyeglasses.

Legally blind (in the USA) refers to an individual whose vision is affected beyond what glasses can correct. This is a bit difficult to describe in writing but: If the strongest prescription possible cannot bring that person’s vision up to 20/20, they are legally blind. This is not the same as having no vision.

Deafblind or DeafBlind refers to an individual with any combination of vision and Deaf gain/hearing loss, ranging from mild to profound Deaf gain/hearing loss and from low vision to total blindness.

Visual acuity refers to clarity of vision and is the source of numbers like 20/20, 20/30, etc. This is another one that’s weird to describe so stick with me. My vision is about 20/40 (last I went to the eye doctor lol) which means that I see at 20 feet what someone with 20/20 vision sees at 20 feet. The top number is always 20, and refers to the 20/20 standard, while the lower number describes the visual acuity of the person in question. If their visual acuity is 20/10, that means they see at ten feet what a person with 20/20 vision would see at 20 feet. If they see at 20 feet what a person with 20/20 vision would see at 200 feet, they are medically considered blind.

Visual functioning is (basically) a measure of how well a person can use visual information in completing tasks. This is assessed a number of different ways.

Residual vision is another way of referring to the functional vision of a person with low vision or blindness. 

I’m not going to go through all the different kinds of blindness and eye conditions, because that would take too long, and this is already a pretty long vocab section. But there are lots of different kinds of conditions and disabilities affecting eyes and vision! Please explore them :)

Blind Culture?

Is there Blind culture in the same way that there is Deaf culture? Difficult to say. It’s an ongoing debate, and I’m going to briefly address each side, and then leave it up to you to research further how this might affect your character and your story.

Historically, the blind community have rejected the idea that blind individuals have a shared culture. The reasons for this are very well outlined in this letter, which I highly recommend reading. To summarize it here: Blind people are not isolated from sighted people in the same way that Deaf people have been historically isolated from hearing people. The reason for this is generally acknowledged to be the lack of, or existence of, a language barrier. Blind people use the same language as the sighted people around them, while Deaf people have used signed language as opposed to spoken language. Where no language barrier exists, this position argues, no separate culture forms or needs to form.

On the other hand - there are certainly experiences that are shared by people across the visually impaired spectrum that fully sighted people do not have. Blind or low vision people access and interpret the world in different ways. There is, analogous to Deaf communities, a history of blind or low vision children being educated separately from sighted children, and of discrimination throughout the lifespan that has isolated visually impaired people from sighted society.

What does all of this mean? It means that there is less consensus about what it means to be visually impaired, and what values or traditions unite that experience. It means that there is less of a framework for how your visually impaired character might relate to other visually impaired characters or their broader community. I highly encourage further exploration within your own story, as well as making sure that whatever choices you’re making about the character’s relationship to their vision is grounded in conscious choice and research. Just because there are no easy answers about a collective blind culture does not mean that a blind character can be written the same as a sighted character but without the vision.

Assistive Technology

Assistive technology (as a reminder, this is not specific to visual impairments) refers to pretty much anything used to make the lives of disabled people easier.

Official American government definition is:  "Any item, piece of equipment or product system, whether acquired commercially off the shelf, modified, or customized, that is used to increase, maintain, or improve the functional capabilities of children with disabilities. The term does not include a medical device that is surgically implanted, or the replacement of such device."

Braille is a tactile system of writing in which raised dots represent letters, numbers, and punctuation. More on this later.

A screen reader is a software program that either reads written text on a screen aloud, or produces a Braille display.

Speech-to-text programs are software programs that...convert speech to text.

Text-to-speech or TTS are programs that convert written text into spoken speech. These were also commonly used on landline phones by d/Deaf people before text messaging became commonplace. 

Seeing Eye dogs are service dogs that are trained to help their blind owners move and navigate independently.

White canes are white canes with a red stripe. These are both navigational tools for B/VI people, and used to communicate to others that the person carrying it is B/VI. Accordingly, it is illegal in some US states to carry a white cane if you are not visually impaired. Only 2-8% of B/VI people actually use them, though, and it requires dedicated practice to use them effectively. They are designed to vibrate differently when they come in contact with different types of surfaces, and proper practice can help cane users distinguish between different obstacles. 

Braille and the Braille Literacy Crisis

Braille, as mentioned before, is a tactile way of writing, which helps B/VI people read and write effectively. I’m not going to do an exhaustive explanation, but essentially, a different combination of raised dots represents each letter of the written alphabet. The sentence I’m writing, rewritten in Braille, would have the exact same words and structure, but would be expressed in raised dots. There are abbreviated forms that are less commonly used and may be used by more skilled readers or those reading texts with specialized, space-saving abbreviations.

Less than 10 percent of legally blind in the US can read Braille, and only 10 percent of legally blind children are currently learning it. This is a huge problem. Over 70% of blind adults are unemployed, and up to 50% of blind students drop out of high school. There is a strong, scientifically supported link between literacy and employment.

Technology should supplement literacy, not replace it. Screen readers and text-to-speech are great tools, but are not an adequate replacement for literacy.

Reading English text is not always the best possible method of reading. The misguided belief that reading Braille is isolating and stigmatizing leads many to push reading text over reading Braille, even when this is inappropriate or even impossible. Some children achieve higher levels of literacy through reading Braille.

Implications for your writing: Can your character read Braille? Why, or why not? What impact does their illiteracy have on their life?

Rethink

I’ve tried a couple different headings here cuz as always, don’t want to tell people unequivocally not to write things. But these are things you should really think hard about before you include them in your writing.

So, things to rethink:

Overused tropes for B/VI characters:

Blind seer/blind mystic

Innocent, pure, noble, sweet etc.

Bumbling oaf B/VI person

Feeling people’s faces as a way to “know what they look like”

Does not happen in real life, more of a stereotype/sighted person’s fantasy

“Helen Keller didn’t exist” TikTok conspiracy theory (not a writing thing but a pet peeve I can’t not mention)

This is ableist. The only reason people think she wasn’t able to accomplish things is because she was deafblind and that’s fucking bullshit. It is not a cute silly TikTok joke. It’s ableism, and it’s disgusting.

Blindness negating power/ability.

This can be anything from an actual superpower (X-Men) to a technological advance (Star Trek) to a supernatural ability (Avatar: The Last Airbender.)

In real life, this could be having someone with other senses that compensate to an unrealistic degree, or echolocation, which, while it proves successful for some people, is hard, takes a ton of effort, and doesn’t work for everyone.

Resources/Recommendations

Please add recommendations in reblogs and comments! I really haven’t watched a lot of TV or movies that have blind characters, which sucks :/

Haben: The Deafblind Woman Who Conquered Harvard Law By Haben Girma is an autobiography of a deafblind woman that is incredibly well written and discusses independence and activism.

The World I Live In by Helen Keller describes life as a deafblind individual and is really powerful and beautiful.

#disability writing guide #writing disabled characters #writing blind characters #writing blindness #low vision #blindness #blind characters #disability representation #writing disability

[cripplecharacters]

Im sorry if this is a dumb question but how would someone use a white cane to locate and go down stairs, specifically if they are at the top of the stairwell. I'm asking because im the story Im writing a blind character (who is the protagonist btw) has to go downstairs to reunite with his younger sibling but he cant take the elevators because the power is out (and there's a monster chasing after him so that doesnt help) I want to make sure I write this scene accurately, especially since I am sighted and do not use a white cane myself. Thanks in advance and sorry again if this is a dumb question.

Hi! Not a dumb question at all. I will do my best to explain it in writing. Most blind people are perfectly comfortable using stairs if they have cane skills, so I appreciate that you aren’t shying away from having your blind character using them.

Finding the top step is super easy. You just tap or slide the tip of your cane around until you find the place where the floor drops off, and then briefly slide the tip of the cane along the edge of the step so you can orient your body to go down the stairs at the right angle and not accidentally go down diagonal or anything like that.

Actually going down the stairs with a white cane is pretty easy as well, because the nice part about using a white cane as opposed to a guide dog or a low vision aid is that the cane can give you an exact idea of the size and depth of the step, so you aren’t left wondering until you actually step down.

The tip of your cane should always be two steps ahead of you. This applies for going up as well as down. So if the character is standing at the top of the steps, he would put his cane down on the step in front of him, which will give him a clear idea of the height and depth of the step, and then put the tip down one more step beyond that. As he steps down, the tip of the cane should move down to the next step beyond that, so every time he steps, the cane is still two steps ahead. He will know he is at the bottom when his cane slides forward on the floor of the landing instead of finding another step dropoff. Having the cane two full steps ahead will give him enough time to slow down when he finds the bottom with his cane so he doesn’t try to step down again onto flat floor.

In case you are also interested in how he could go up the stairs as well, the two-step rule still applies, but it’s slightly different. Every time he takes a step up, he should be tapping his cane against the front of the step two steps up. When he is approaching the top, his cane won’t have another front of a step to tap, so it will just swing out into open air, which is how he will know he is approaching the top and can slow down for the last two steps and not accidentally try to step up again onto empty air.

If he has been using a cane for a long time, this should feel totally natural and shouldn’t slow him down at all. It becomes muscle memory and second nature pretty quickly, so he should be able to get down the stairs as fast as he needs to without incident or worry.

I hope this made sense!

— Mod Lane

#mod Lane #anonymous #white canes #mobility aids #blind characters #writing blind characters #disabled characters #writing disabled characters #blindness #blind

[krtart]

Writing Blind & Visually Impaired Characters

A while back, someone asked me if I could share some of the resources I use. I figured maybe other people might find it useful as well! ^_^ Due to computer switches I could only trawl through the last ~5 years of research, but it’s still a fair collection.

(Obligatory disclaimer: I am not visually impaired! I just try to listen to people who are. The vast majority of these are written by and/or for people with visual impairments.)

.

Vocab

American Printing House key definitions — Wayback machine

.

Blogs, posts, essays, and speeches by folk with visual impairments

General sites:

Mimzy Writing Online (masterpost for writing blind characters) — Wayback machine

Where’s Your Dog — Wayback machine

Albinism Up Close — Wayback machine

Specific posts:

Why blindfolding yourself is misleading:

NFB member John Pere’s video & transcript — Wayback machine

Graduate researcher Arielle Silverman’s video & transcript — Wayback machine

Blind physician — Wayback machine

Missing eye / monocular vision — Wayback machine

Driving with albinism — Wayback machine (chronological series of posts, next post link is at the bottom)

.

Posts of unknown/mixed authorship

Writing blind characters (tumblr thread) — Wayback machine

.

Sighted guidance

How to Be a Sighted Guide by Vision Loss Resources — Wayback machine

.

Long cane use

Care and Feeding of the White Cane: Instructions in Cane Travel for Blind People by Thomas Bickford, hosted on the NFB website — Wayback machine

.

Orientation and Mobility

This is the term for specific training around navigating the world with a visual impairment. It will be a useful search term for you.

Additionally, I have purchased the O&M training course Step By Step that was published by the American Printing House. The actual video training modules are incredibly clunky to navigate through, and personally I’ve never had the patience. I’m also not comfortable redistributing their whole product like that.

But… the pdf study guides from the program are useful on their own, and those I will share! (Especially since they used to be available for free on the APH website. >_>;)

These are from the second edition.

O&M Training study guides (Internet Archive access)

.

Careers

American Printing House career connect — Wayback machine

.

Cooking

NFB: Suggestions for the Blind Cook — Wayback machine

APH: Safe Cooking Techniques — Wayback machine

BBC: Article about a blind Master Chef contestant — Wayback machine

.

Visualization tools

For remnant sight and color blindness.

Visual acuity simulator — Wayback machine (icons at the top switch between vision charts & illustrative photos, bar at the bottom adjusts acuity)

Color blindness simulator — Wayback machine

.

Thinking about disability

These aren’t specifically about visual impairment, and include other physical disabilities as well as autism.

But they’re important voices to hear, and can be useful for framing your understanding and general approach.

"Don't Mourn For Us" by Jim Sinclair — Wayback machine

“Confessions of a Bitter Cripple" by Elizabeth Barnes — Wayback machine

"If you can do X, why can't you do Y?" by Mel Baggs — Wayback machine

People can adapt to and accommodate for more than you might think (tumblr thread) — Wayback machine

.

And finally, some related tags on my personal blog: Disability | Disability rights | Writing resources: disability | Accessibility

#writing blind characters #blindness #visual impairment #blind characters #representation in fiction #writing resources #orientation and mobility #can you tell that I’ve been v. sad about masterposts with broken links in the past sldkfhsdg #the wayback machine isn’t a perfect solution but it’s better than nothing. Anyway! Please let me know if any of these links seem broken! #long canes #sighted guides #krtart #resources #masterposts #krt talks

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

You're mine now, old man.

[First] Prev <–-> Next

#poorly drawn mdzs #mdzs #wei wuxian #a-qing #xiao xingchen #A-qing's story kicks off so strong. You really get a sense that she feels strongly attached to xxc during the pre-empathy scenes #and that she has a strong sense of loyalty and perseverance with strong survival instinct #but then you see her before all the tragedy and you *immediately* learn she is a clever trickster! #She follows xxc not out of gratitude but out of a sense that this guy is her meal ticket. #xxc is kind and strong but most importantly *noble* #she can smell the self-sacrificing bright eyed hope on this stranger. She knows the mere fact she's a young blind girl means #he will protect her. The fact he gives her a little money doesn't hurt her justification but tbh she would have followed all the same #a-qing is *the* catgirl of all time actually. Follows you for the fact you provide food and shelter. Opportunistic. May grow to be loyal. #That's not even getting into the parallels here between these two characters and wwx (who is seeing these events play out) #the yi city trio are arguably the three split aspects of wwx: who he feels like (a-qing the opportunist) who he wants to be (xxc the noble) #and who he feels seen as (xy the vengeful). #one day I'll write a more robust analysis on that. prob in the tags though #(His a-qing parallels are also tied with the fact they both were street rat orphans who learned how to code-switch to be whoever #they need to be to feel safe. I have a lot more thoughts to share but augh another time...another time)

[whaliiwatching]

he is so. to me

closeups of my favorites <3

#spider man: across the spider verse #spider punk #spider noir #hobie brown #noirpunk #you can understand now why venom!noir occurred to me #skrungly little creacher #that’s a cat right there. a spidery kitten #(he is 6 foot something i write him as 30 and he Has a Gun) #or rather 32… ken im joining u #had a mild case of Blinded by Hearts Upon Seeing Noir in 2018 #has returned with a VENGEANCE #he also has big ol eyes they’re just metaphorical #i usually strongly dislike when fandom decides something is non negotiable for a character #the only exception to this is that noir’s favorite color is purple #solely because Purple Lovers are insane over purple. like whole room all clothes every gift insane #that’s a noir thing to do/be i think #cw gun

[yaralulu]

I’m honestly so scared of getting an elucien book because of the possibility of sjm ruining lucien’s character the same way she did with cassian and pretty much every other male character.I need lucien to fight back against the bad writing because if his character gets assassinated I’ll lose my mind.Pls god let lucien escape the sjm toxic mate writing 🗣️🙏.

#i’m turning a blind eye if he starts acting severely out of character #sjm pls choose your words very carefully when writing him #acotar #lucien vanserra #pro lucien vanserra #elucien #sjm books #sjm critical

[wisteria-whump]

i love when a rescued whumpee slowly drops details about their life to their new friends and the friends try to mentally catalog everything because they know so little about whumpee and they share so infrequently

#loosely based off of me watching house md and being desperate to know everything about these characters #im also completely age blind so when they drop a detail that reveals their age or age range its like i hit the jackpot #whump #whump prompt #whump prompts #whump writing #whump idea #whump blog #whump scenario #tw whump #whump tw

[ebonyheartnet]

Random Child: It’s so cool that Daredevil’s just like me!

Nanny: And why’s that, honey?

Child: Like, sensory stuff gets overwhelming for him and Spidey, and they can still be heroes!

Child: He’s not good at eye contact either, but that’s okay. His hero friends are really cool about it anyways!

Child: Mom was right; being Autistic is awesome!

Daredevil, 6 blocks away: Aww.

-3 days later-

Spider-Man: Hey Double-D, long time no see!

Daredevil: Always is, webhead.

Spider-Man: Whatcha been up to lately?

Daredevil: Not much, but this kid said the cutest thing the other day.

Spider-Man: Are you gonna tell me or just keep it to yourself?

Daredevil: They were just really happy to see autistic adults being heroes.

Spider-Man: Wait, you’re autistic?

Matt, assuming Peter also got clocked at 7: You didn’t know yet??

#ebony writes the thing #marvel #daredevil #spider-man #peter parker #matt murdock #actually autistic #I am claiming all of the heroes with sensory issues. #originally this was gonna have Peter be shocked that his pal wasn’t in the loop. but then I remembered. #Matt ‘I am literally blind. and like. one of the most iconic disabled characters ever.’ would take my 🍑 to court.

[blindbeta]

Hi! I saw your posts about how important it is to have multiple blind characters. So far, only one of my main characters is blind (she had an eye infection when she was a baby.) I also have an important side character who has low vision due to albinism. What would be some good ways to include more blind characters?

Including More Blind Characters in Your Story

Hi,

Sounds like you have two already.

I think this post would help. It has examples from an alternative universe I came up with that includes many blind characters and how they relate to each other.

Also, consider where your characters might meet other blind folks. At school? At university? Inquiring about accessible reading materials? Maybe they meet during orientation and mobility, an accessible cooking class, or at a party. Maybe they are introduced through mutual friends. Maybe the village gossip tells them about the other. Maybe they use magic to connect to other blind people in the areas.

Here are some posts o that might be helpful, one on writing multiple blind characters, one of which includes examples, and a helpful reblog about giving your blind characters a community.

Here is a post on whether multiple blind characters is unrealistic or not. Spoiler, it isn’t. But I hope this will help you in some way.

By having two characters, you’re already doing great in my opinion. Just focus on their characterization and development as people and you are golden!

#blind #blind characters #writing blind characters #writing more than one blind character #writing multiple blind characters #ask

[zukkaoru]

🌱 alive & free (look at me!) 🌱

The man is wrapped in a blanket that was likely white at one point but is now smeared with dirt and grass stains. His hair, too, is dirty. Like he’s been sleeping on the ground for more than just one night. Kenji tiptoes over to him. He rolls his shoulder, then kneels down beside the man and pokes him. “Um, sir, are you okay?” The man doesn’t respond. Kenji pokes him harder, putting a little extra strength into it with the help of his ability. The man rolls from his side over onto his stomach, groaning. Kenji breathes out a sigh of relief. That means he’s not dead, at least. “Are you—” he whistles. “Are you hurt?” “Twelve seconds,” the man responds, still facedown in the dirt. “Then, I’m going kill you.”

after the decay of angels incident, kenji makes a new friend and nikolai starts to heal

🌱 22.4k words || kenji & nikolai || post-doa arc 🌱 written for corey @that-was-anticlimactic <3

#kenji miyazawa #nikolai gogol #bsd #bungou stray dogs #nikolai #fyonikonathan #<- there's enough in there it counts i'm tagging it here #anyway. um. oh my god i can't believe i wrote this #my longest oneshot in just over two years. my longest bsd fic to date. #and it's about two characters i have STRUGGLED with getting down #like nikolai i was pretty confident with when i started this. but kenji????? #man i jumped into this blind with him and i somehow found him along the way #anyway not to toot my own horn but i went off with this fic. it's a banger. you all should read it #grace's writing tag

[whumpinggrounds]

hi, I saw you write about where blindnes is acceptable to be added to character. Is it appropiate in this case? The story is fantasy (related to gnostisism) and, as I know, some angels can kill when they look at you. I want to make them blind and one of those angels an her father to act as she is useless and that to make them hate her father. Thank you in advance!

Hi!

Wanted to clarify - it's always acceptable to make your characters blind! My Writing Blind/Low Vision Characters post is just some advice that I hope is helpful to people writing these kinds of characters. Everyone should always write what they're interested in writing.

I also am not blind myself, so I don't totally feel comfortable rubber-stamping an idea as okay or not okay. I don't think it's my place to decide whether someone's writing is good representation. I think you should write what you want to and hopefully some of what's in that post is helpful or thought-provoking for you!

#disability asks #writing blind characters

[cripplecharacters]

heyy so im writing a character that's blind and she uses a white cane, and during one of her missions (she's part of a spy ring) she's gonna get hurted and is gonna need to use a cane (a walking stick) permanently. so how would she act in this situation where she basically needs to different types of cane to keep her mobility? or do you have any other sugestion about what to do in this situation?

Hi! Thanks for asking.

In this situation, she would likely need to have two canes; both a white cane and a walking stick, used in different hands. The two canes are so different that one came can’t really serve both functions, so she’d need to have one of each. This would of course leave her without a free hand most of the time, so she may want to prioritize using backpacks more than other kinds of bags that would require a free hand. It may be useful to research the experiences of double crutch users to get more ideas for how she would manage things with no free hands.

Depending on exactly what her physical support needs are, she might instead use a guide dog that has also been trained for mobility assistance or counterbalancing. Most guide dog schools can provide some cross training on tasks for additional disabilities, though you will want to research mobility assistance dogs to see if the kinds of tasks a dog can do would be useful for her particular disability. If her particular needs will be met by mobility tasks, then it’s entirely possible to have a guide dog that is also trained in those additional tasks.

Using a guide dog that is cross trained for mobility support would solve the no free hands problem since it only requires one hand, but a guide dog is definitely a very different travel style from a white cane, so you will want to really think about if she as a person would want to switch to a guide dog travel style. It’s a very personal and individual choice, and one is not inherently better than the other, so the switch shouldn’t be made casually. It’s entirely possible that she would be interested in switching to a guide dog lifestyle, but it’s also entirely possible that she would much prefer to use her white cane along with another mobility aid, instead.

One other option could be to use a white cane with a wheelchair depending on the nature of her injury. It sounds like something like a walking stick or mobility assistance dog would be better based on your ask, but if there is more information that might make a wheelchair relevant, that can also be an option. It can be somewhat harder to use a white cane with a manual wheelchair, so many people prefer to use a power chair with a white cane, but a manual chair can absolutely be done if a manual chair would suit her lifestyle better.

If there are any blind and multiply disabled people or physically disabled people (especially those who use mobility assistance service dogs) who would like to chime in in the notes, please do!

Hope this helps!

— mod Lane

#mod Lane #guide animals #blindness #writing blind characters #blind characters #mobility aids #white canes #canes #wheelchairs #service animals #mobility assistance dogs #writing multiply disabled characters

[ganymedesclock]

Any genre of game can have a disabled protagonist if you aren't a coward / willing to put the work in, but I'm currently batting around the concept of specifically point-and-click puzzle adventure games with a highly disabled protagonist.

Often, the pace of such games tends sedate and contemplative. Your character is seldom in a hurry; they are mostly faced by trying to figure out how to accomplish a particular task, and if a deadline is imposed, it's an extra thing to juggle.

This could be an interesting presumption to incorporate from a watsonian lens, through the viewpoint of a protagonist who may have limited mobility, pain and/or fatigue that make hurrying punitively inaccessible. It'd let the player familiarize themselves with early puzzles if the first thing they have to figure out how to do is say, get their player character out of bed in an environment where they don't have their usual fallbacks.

(also if this is also a walking adventure, it'd let you dodge accusations of the insurmountable waist-high fence- your intrepid hero MIGHT be able to climb over those bricks if they didn't have two bad hips and a walker to worry about!)

#writing ruminations #speaking broadly I think there should be way more games that have disabled protagonists and directly incorporate the protagonist's conditio #into game mechanics and structure #like that game Endoparasitic that had the basic premise your character has only one remaining limb (right arm) #and how this affects the structure of everything you have to do #I recall also hearing about a game where you play a blind protagonist navigating a haunted house #where tapping your cane to identify your surroundings is both instrumental and risky as the hostile forces can hear it

[bylertruther]

sometimes i think about this one post that someone made where they said that everyone treats will in a special manner because he's a sensitive kid and that's why mike treats him differently, but it's just like... i mean. yeah. you're right lol. everyone does treat him differently precisely because of his sensitive and meek nature, but the person they're specifically thinking of is lucas.

lucas has a will voice and he certainly doesn't treat will like he does dustin or mike, BUT the difference between lucas and mike is that lucas never once treats will the way he treats max. he has never been written into a situation where dustin tells max that lucas is going to X, Y, and Z for her in no time, only to then cut to lucas going and immediately doing X, Y, and Z for will while max is somewhere waiting on him to finally figure out how to talk to her like a human being. max never once gets jealous of will or gets left behind for / switches places with will either. lucas treats will sweetly in an entirely platonic manner and he always has.

meanwhile, mike treats will sweetly in a way that other characters on the show–namely lucas and max–expect him to treat el. and the difference is further highlighted by how he does all of the right things for will, but never el, and certainly not without hand-holding explain like i'm five levels of guidance.

despite dating eleven, that treatment is solely reserved specifically for will. he always knows what to say, what to do, what will wants, and he feels comfortable enough with will to do it all with ease. and when he doesn't know, he still feels safe enough to work and talk through it with him rather than retreating to someone else and dishing all their problems to them instead of him.

none of that EVER happens between will and lucas or will and dustin. ever! they treat him differently, but not in a way that's similar to how they treat their girlfriends or are expected to treat their girlfriends.

like. there just really is no other relationship in the party that is written like mike and will's lol. lucas was willing to go to the gate himself to find will all on his own, proving that he most definitely loves will an extraordinary amount, but i feel like there's a CLEAR distinction made between all of those friendships which highlights which are platonic and which are not.

will was upset with both lucas and mike in season three, but there's a Reason he mostly blew up at mike and proceeded to go to castle byers after and tear a picture of them right down the middle while memories that start and end with mike's voice play in the background, and it's not just because will likes him.

will's behaviors have remained consistent and admiringly Normal, even with his larger than life feelings for mike, but mike's are always changing and clearly indicative of him struggling with Something that he's yet to tell anyone about in full. it's mike who couldn't juggle being with el and being friends with will at the same time. can the same be said for will and lucas? or will and dustin? obviously not.

#byler #mine #like. hello. for the love of god HELLOOOOOOOOOOOOO #ppl pay more attention to the dialogue and story of shows like fucking riverdaIe than they do st #i just don't get it and i will Never get it #i know that heteronormativity is a thing but you have to be actively ignoring or blinding yourself to clear as day writing if you just #don't see it at all lol as someone tht claims to be an active watcher #these are not real people everything that a character does is a deliberate choice made by groups of people like what's not clicking?!?!?!?!