OK, After inadvertantly starting
This Thread, which lead the entire set of posts on a tangent away from topic, I am now quite, quite mad.
It would seem that the Half-Witted Perfectly-Sighted fools who make up the majority of the
/. communite have absolutely
NO APPRECIATION for how important perfect vision is.
I have been legally "Partially Sighted" since birth, which according to
This complete dickhead means "Squat" - something that I take great offence to.
The US May not have an Intermediate Definition between "Perfect Vision" and "Blindness", but the UK Does. It would seem, however, that as usual, the Bloody Yanks want the whole world to bend to their narrow minded ways of thinking.
It is fortunate that the majority of people with some form of visual impairment can use corrective optics (usually glasses or contact lenses) to bring their vision back into line with the "normal", but there are those of us in the world for whome corrective optics alone are of little or no use.
In the case where a person suffers from simple optical lightpath problems, such as
Astigmatism or simple Short / Long sight, such correction is usually quite simple. However, fur those who suffer from more complex issues, such as
Nystagmus Or blind-spots on the retina surface, such correction is much more difficult, and in many cases totally futile. Combine Astigmatism, Nystagmus,
Albinism, Short Sight, and retinal blind-spots into one case, and you have a corrective nightmare - also known as Me!
I doubt that many
/.'ers can even
BEGIN to appreciate just how fristrating it can be, knowing that each day, the simplest of tasks are going to defeat you totally. Take, for example, a task most of you will take forgranted, shopping - you can stand in the shop, scan the shelves, and easily see what is on offer - you can see the price-tags, ingredients lists on food, track-lists on CD's, and countless other things. For anyone with a moderate or severe Visual Impairment, this is quite simply not the case.
Sure, I carry a very high-power magnifier with me everywhere I go. That's all well and good, but still doesn't help with price-tags which are located on top or bottom shelves, and in the day of Bar-Coded sales, most goods do not have a price tag on them - you
Have to look at the shelf.
But, let's get even simpler. Walking around an unfamiliar town. Now, for the Yanks out there, this will seem like raving nonsense, since most of your towns and cities consist of a gridwork layout, so it's almost impossible to get lost, but most places in the world aren't so neatly ordered, so try and open your tiny little minds a little... In order to navigate your way around any town or city, you must be able to read the street signs. For those of you with "normal" vision, that is easy - signs are designed so that a person with "normal" vision can read them easily 20 to 30 feet away. I can't even see that there is
A SIGN until I am 5 or 6 feet away, by which time the sign in question is usually so high up, there is no way of reading it anyway!
Yes, there are other tools which help here, Monocular Telescopes for one, but they are awkward to use, and don't work well with prescription glasses.
Most of you cannot possibly imagine what it would be like to lose your sight - you don't understand in the slightest how vitally important it is to you, because you take it forgranted.
You're probably thinking "Jeez, this guy thinks a lot of himself, doesn't he realise there are millions of people in the world far worse off than he is" - well, think again - My mother cannot get around anywhere without a wheelchair, so I also have a unique perspective on Physical Disabilities Access as well. Not to mention the fact that for 10 weeks some time ago, due to an unfortunate accident, I was forced to get around on Crutches - not so difficult for those of you who can see properly, but Nystagmus espesially screws up your balance completely. This also gave me insight into how hard it is for those with a Physical Disability (in particular with a damaged or missing lower limb) to gain access to the facilities that most of you take forgranted.
You don't know how good you've got life until someone takes away something you cannot live without, such as a limb, or your sight or hearing.
Oh, and to set the record straight for this
This complete dickhead On the Snellen Scale, 6/36 and 20/120 are the same. The numbers are simple ratios, meaning, in short, that my visual acuity is 6 times lower than that of normal vision
WITH GLASSES . Without, I am much closer to 20/180 (3/26) - and comes close to the US definition of legal Blindness.
OK, Rant Over.
