Blind or Partially Sighted

Around 350,000 people are registered blind or partially sighted in the UK (RNIB,  2017).  A person who is blind has a high degree of vision loss. Only about 18 per cent of blind people are totally blind – most can distinguish between light and dark.

JISC offers advice supporting learners with visual impairments (archived in March 2020) and if you want to see how someone who is blind accesses digital content Sina Bahram has a YouTube video that demonstrates how he uses a screen reader at 950 words per minute. 

SCIPS offers a Detailed description of Visual Impairments Impacting on Learning and Teaching with strategies. It may be important to understand the impact of the use of Braille, and the OU have provided a PDF document about ‘Studying with Little or No Sight’ (2018) that covers notetaking, writing assignments and being organised and many other subjects.  The W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) provides a collection of resources on how people with disabilities use the web.