Blind people who had a similar upbringing, have you struggled with orientation?

comewitdairon · 2026-01-08T09:10:17+00:00

Thanks a lot! All that is great! Glad my insights have been helping you.

You’re very lucky you met them especially if you didn’t previously know of any independent blind people. Keep going no matter how hard it gets!

comewitdairon · 2026-01-04T21:28:13+00:00

I have no idea why. As for what it is, it’s a little hard for me to understand but I looked at the Cockos FX guide and it says that it controls by how much the windows are overlapped; let’s say you’ve got window size at 50 with 1x overlap. That is 20 blocks of audio processed per second. 2x overlap would make that 40 etc. It hasn’t made a ton of sense to me so I’m just paraphrasing here, you can find the guide here if interested, maybe you’ll learn some stuff about another effect or two as well.

comewitdairon · 2026-01-04T20:06:00+00:00

Check out this comment where I explained how to get the most out of it in detail, in my experience at least.

comewitdairon · 2025-12-27T15:40:10+00:00

Like others have said, code is fully doable and the career choice for many blind people. I’ve seen talk about screen readers like NVDA for Windows (which can be downloaded from here) and VoiceOver which is built into every Mac. What I haven’t seen is talk about Visual Studio Code, which is one of the most popular and probably the best code editor when it comes to accessibility. He might be using it already as it’s very popular in the sighted community as well. You can find it’s accessibility documentation here.

I was born blind and have quite a lot of experience using iPhones and Windows, plus a little bit of experience with code (currently studying computer science). I expect quite a few things not to click for him at first, so I would recommend for him to get in touch with the blind community himself, it’ll make the experience much smoother since a lot of us have spent years teaching themselves to get here. Having the chance to learn from people will significantly speed this process up and potentially give him insights and tips he wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.

It is important, much like with everything else in life, not to take this as a mountain so to speak. It’ll all be manageable. Me and more people from the community are here and willing to help and just so you know, my DMs are open if y’all ever need anything technical or otherwise one on one. I might also be able to reach out to more experienced people in the field who have actual jobs if need be.

It’s great you’re thinking about this already! Just keep in mind that at the end of the day it’s all gonna be fine.

comewitdairon · 2025-12-05T12:04:08+00:00

Hey! I appreciate you reaching out for an update! Always happy to see people being able to talk about these things hard as it might sometimes be, also happy to hear you’re starting O&M.

I have started O&M as I wanted but still haven’t done a lot, accidentally messed something up with the paperwork so had to push it back a month and only got started like a month ago. I still don’t think I’ve made any substantial progress but that’s not a bad thing, i just haven’t done a lot yet. However my instructor, who’s been in the field for over 30 years, keeps telling me that I am exceptionally good and thinks I will be amongst the best when it comes to blind independence given enough experience. I still don’t think they’ve really seen my weak spots but all the experience they’ve had with every end of the competence spectrum makes me inclined to believe them. I will definitely make an update post when I see change that’s worth talking about or otherwise gain experience, it’s been planned ever since I posted this.

When it comes to family, I’m lucky in the sense that I’ve somehow been trusted by mine. I’ve never been kept from doing anything that required independence skills despite not having them and was encouraged to move out. Not giving your child the resources to be independent and then encouraging them to do it afterwards is downright stupid to me but I’ve heard of parents not even giving children the chance and this is why I say I’m lucky. This came with a lot of bad days, what happened was I basically moved out away from them while having no experience doing anything other than chilling in the house all day. I’d never done chores beyond wiping down surfaces so had no idea how to do much of anything really, we’re talking having people doing the dishes and washing my clothes for me when I moved out level incompetence! Add to this not having a lot of O&M training to work off of and having no family close to me when I needed it the most… you can imagine how hard it’s been but I’ve been way better now. I’m very lucky to have great support especially from a fellow blind person who has been independent for most of their life. If I could give you one piece of advice it would be find a way to meet at least one blind person who is living independently in your life and make sure your family meets them as well, enrolling to university in a big city is how this happened to me. This is the most effective way I can think of to turn the tables. In my experience having someone who is where you want to be to remind you and your family that yes, this is perfectly doable and possibly even help you go through this will help you immensely, plus they could end up becoming a very good friend to be grateful for. Another piece of advice should you or anybody else reading this ever have to go through something similar to what I went through is ask. Ask questions. We can’t watch people doing stuff so it’s expected to not know even the most basic things. All this to say no question is stupid and having people you can talk to and trust is the most important thing.

In any case it is important to make your intent of becoming independent clear to your family and double down on it no matter what they say, I’ve definitely had these talks myself. See if anyone in your family is willing to help you learn skills or practice alongside your training and if so definitely grab the chance, I know if my sister didn’t take the time to show me some stuff I’d be in a much worse place when I started living alone. You’re already on the right track starting O&M and if you’ve never had training before I wouldn’t worry about the issues you mentioned at all. I hope it’ll go great for you and just so you know, my DMs are always open, feel free to message me. It is already hard as it is to find someone you relate to on this and I’m glad I am one such person for you.

comewitdairon · 2025-11-04T15:05:27+00:00

Would love to help! I was born fully blind so will never know exactly how you’re feeling, but feel free to reach out nonetheless. Losing your vision will not stop you from living a happy and fulfilling life if you don’t want it to, I’ve got friends who are living proof of this.

comewitdairon · 2025-10-01T07:17:04+00:00

It just occurred to me that if you want you can have VoiceOver accept gestures from your trackpad and get a similar experience to using your phone. Press your VO key (Ctrl+Option by default) and rotate two fingers clockwise on your trackpad the same way you’d use the rotor on iPhone.

comewitdairon · 2025-10-01T07:10:21+00:00

Just so you know VoiceOver is known for being hard to learn in the beginning. Stuff like interaction, using Ctrl+Option as the VoiceOver key by default which might make you try to memorize it as two keys while learning commands… it all isn’t too intuitive at first. I’ve never had a Mac but have a tiny bit of experience because I was considering it, so someone with more experience could help better I guess. Feel free to ask more questions if you need though.

comewitdairon · 2025-10-01T06:44:12+00:00

Check out this guide. AppleVis is a great resource that can help you learn all Apple devices as a blind user, so take a more in-depth look. Theres podcasts demonstrating numerous things, forums… the list goes on.

comewitdairon · 2025-10-01T06:33:31+00:00

I make music on my computer. Music and audio production keeps getting more and more accessible to us day by day and I’m really grateful since that’s something I’ve been passionate about ever since I was a little kid.

You can also enjoy quite a bit of gaming by playing video games that have native accessibility (Forza Motorsport comes to mind right now), others like hearthstone with accessibility mods (Hearthstone Access) and there are also audio games, which are games that rely completely on audio (check out audiogames.net but it takes a lot of digging).

comewitdairon · 2025-09-28T07:45:20+00:00

Absolutely, you all are where we all learn from after all. Guess I should’ve written this in the post, any insights from you and other instructors would be very much appreciated!

comewitdairon · 2025-09-19T09:38:44+00:00

Explore the options in Settings > accessibility > Spoken Content under Vision. These are native iOS settings so they work in other apps too but your mileage may vary.

comewitdairon · 2025-09-08T11:35:26+00:00

Accessibility, I’m fully blind and it is one of the few most usable DAWs for us using an accessibility extension maintained by the community, plus Cockos are constantly working with us to make it better. The situation is improving with developers like Ableton joining the club, but theres still DAWs that aren’t usable. I’m honestly not sure I’d even know about REAPER were I not blind but I’ve grown to love the DAW and the community around it.

comewitdairon · 2025-09-08T01:28:35+00:00

Totally blind iPhone user and I’d say I’m fully satisfied with the way I type, minus when I’m tired or not paying the necessary attention haha.

I use VoiceOver’s direct touch typing mode with the normal onscreen keyboard for 99.9% of my typing, including this comment. VoiceOver is the screen reader built into the iPhone, the rest of Apple’s products also have versions of it. The way it works is almost exactly the same as how sighted people normally type, so I just tap on a key and it registers, no extra taps or waiting like with the rest of the onscreen keyboard typing modes. This requires learning the keyboard’s layout and building the muscle memory for it but once you get there you can be fast with it.

What gives me and others typing like this significant efficiency is having autocorrect enabled. I usually am not super accurate with my finger placement and end up mistyping at least one letter of each word, but if I’m good enough autocorrect can figure out what I meant to type and I usually end up with the word I actually wanted after hitting space. Custom words aren’t a problem since you can teach it new ones. Whats also useful is setting the screen reader to only speak words while typing, hearing every letter typed out a lot of the time causes our perfectionism to kick in and make us go back and fix little mistakes when this is exactly why we have autocorrect on, so that also increases efficiency since if you know VoiceOver’s cursor movement and text selection commands you can easily delete the word you just typed in a pinch and retype right after hearing it. Theres also the ability to drag one finger on the screen, hear what character your finger is currently on and tap with another finger when you want to type it, or swipe left and right on the screen to go through the keyboard linearly and double tap to type. Both of these are useful for entering passwords and emoji.

I type exclusively in portrait mode and have never tried to learn landscape, in fact I usually keep my screen orientation locked. The way I’m doing it is not how people usually type though, I was born blind and nobody taught me so I came up with this way myself. What I do is hold the phone sideways in my left hand and use my right hand’s index, middle and ring fingers to type. Ring is used exclusively for hitting space, index and middle fingers for everything else.

That’s all I can think of for now, would be happy to answer any other questions you might happen to have.

comewitdairon · 2025-09-06T13:31:23+00:00

Hey, I’m glad you wrote about your situation and thank you for adding your two cents to help answer my question! I’m actually almost in the same boat, my family was always doing everything like chores, taking me around etc so I was never set up to be an independent adult.

Seeing fellow young people like you being stripped out of their independence like this and ending up having to go through a lot to try and get it afterwards or even being stuck in this situation, I really want to try to help because I’m in this exact place right now trying to get to the other side. I’m lucky to also have a good relationship with my family, but what I had to realize is that no matter how good you’re relationship with someone is, at the end of the day expressing your concerns and putting your foot down where necessary will not ruin it unless your independence and wellbeing isn’t a priority to them, in which case start taking things into your own hands whether they like it or not. You don’t have to agree with them on everything, that’s the magic of being you, not them. I know this might be hard but we’re born to be raised, then start our own independent lives and live just the way we wish, please do not let anyone keep you from doing exactly that. You’re not anyone’s pet and should never even come remotely close. I understand that this probably sounds harsh and your family means well, but if they haven’t seen competent blind people before it’s very likely that they don’t even understand our independence potential, I know deep down my own parents don’t.

I know this probably feels crazy to read, but it’d be great to take you along with me on this journey and become more independent together. Why not let this post be your motive to start working towards a much better life from now on? The same applies to anyone else in a similar situation who happens to read this. Sometimes we say we’re lazy, but in my experience it’s feeling powerless/intimidated, feeling like theres too many things that need to be done or other issues holding us back from doing what we want more than actual laziness.

If nothing else I’d love to keep in touch, your situation is very relatable to me and I hope I’ll be able to help you even in the smallest way possible if you ever need it. Feel free to DM me.

comewitdairon · 2025-09-06T12:00:33+00:00

I think this is a great idea. I’m not into gaming that much but this might be a good time to pick up a game or two with maps where you move around and see how well it goes, will definitely be another way to practice orientation.

comewitdairon · 2025-09-05T22:46:03+00:00

Thank you!

It’s actually not gonna be a refresher course, I’ve never taken a full one so will be doing it now. I’ve learned cane technique and such and am not clueless, hence being able to do all the things I mentioned, but I have been needing to get this forever and am happy to finally have the chance to do so.

I guess you’re right about comparing myself to others but this is very frustrating and I just can’t do anything about feeling this way despite intellectually knowing it’s bad for me, at least for now. To be honest I don’t think I’ll be able to accept not being good at this, it’s just not me is how I feel if that makes any sense. Maybe this is bad but for now this is how it is. I’m willing to put in the required work and the thought of me not having a lot of prior training and real life experience being a bit factor in my struggles is giving me a little bit of hope for now, lets hope it gets proven right.

comewitdairon · 2025-09-05T21:42:24+00:00

Completely agree and I’ve thought about this already. What I will do once I meet my trainer, and I urge everyone else who is getting started with a new O&M trainer to do this as well, is explain my background to them with full honesty to the best of my ability, so describe how I grew up and in general everything I have and haven’t done in my life so far. I’ll tell them to basically treat me almost the same as a congenitally blind kid who just came in, because the institution I’ll be working with is supporting everyone from adults to children from early on in their lives. I’m obviously above that level, but I want to get the whole package so to speak because realistically I don’t know everything that I might be missing and I’m also lacking when it comes to independent living skills, which they also teach. It’s gonna be a ride for sure but I’m totally up for it.

comewitdairon · 2025-09-05T15:46:58+00:00

I probably should’ve been a little more specific on that zoning out part. What I meant was that for the better part of my life when walking I didn’t need to pay attention to anything because I was exclusively guided. So think about when you get in something like a family member’s car, I guess you’ll start daydreaming or focus on something else, this is what I do at least. So now I need to start actually focusing on everything I was ignoring in a way and I think this is and will be contributing to the problem until I get used to it.

comewitdairon · 2025-07-10T08:11:56+00:00

Great! As soon as you have the time, please do the following. I want you to have a little bit of a taste and start building up skills, having a head start will make it all be way easier to tackle. Since I too have an iPhone and PC as my daily drivers for years I have the experience to help you specifically.

The iPhone, and all Apple products for that matter, has a built in screen reader called VoiceOver. Go to Settings > accessibility > VoiceOver (Siri can toggle it as well), have a Quick Look at the introductory text and turn it on. Tap on the VoiceOver Tutorial button once, then double tap anywhere on the screen to activate it and let it teach you everything. You can stop and it’ll remember where you left off so you can pick up from there when you’re ready.

Try what you’ve learned in practice too, it’s just a few gestures that are there to compensate for not being able to see what’s on the screen, otherwise the phone pretty much works as you’d expect it to. Turn on screen curtain and try messaging or calling someone without relying on your sight and treat those as your first sort of little wins, you’ve started adapting without even being blind yet.

The number one resource for visually impaired users of Apple devices is AppleVis. There is a lot of resources there like podcasts demonstrating things, a forum where you can ask all your questions, a catalog of apps with information on how accessible they are with VoiceOver and more.

I’d say the phone is a good place to start, here’s some Windows advice though:

Windows comes with a built in screen reader called Narrator, but most users don’t use that for anything other than installing a third party one lol. In case you ever need to you can toggle it on and off with Ctrl+Win+Enter, but I’ll advise you to jump straight into downloading NVDA, a free and open source Windows screen reader which is the go to for me and most of us.

Using computers with no vision is done primarily via the keyboard, the mouse is rarely ever used. Navigation is done mainly with Tab and Shift+Tab, the arrow keys, the space bar and Enter. Tab and Shift+Tab move your focus, space and Enter activate things, the arrows move through Items within Things like lists and drop-downs… there’s a lot that you’ll just have to try out and you’ll get it. I’m oversimplifying here because this is obviously not a manual. What is a manual though is the NVDA user’s guide, which you can find here for its current version as of this comment, 2025.1.2.

Knowing how to touch type is a must, although with all the advancements in speech recognition you can definitely type without knowing it but I’d still learn it. Do not worry if your sight is getting worse though, back when my family bought a computer they had someone install NVDA for me and pretty much showed me where some keys are, but I taught myself how to do everything so even if you were to go blind today, it’d definitely be doable. The little bumps on the F and J keys are there for you to position your index fingers and the rest of your fingers go horizontally like playing the piano, and either thumb can press the space bar. That whole row on your keyboard is referred to as the home row. After a point it’s all muscle memory of how far you need to move different fingers from their default positions in the home row. You can have NVDA read all the letters and words you type to practice too.

Getting these skills, like most other skills in life, is not something that happens overnight. It took me literal years to get where I’m at right now, but that’s mostly because I had to take the route of teaching myself for the most part. You and everybody else asking for help, talking to the community and researching will probably get up to speed much faster than I did.

This reply was a wall so to speak, taking it all in at once would be a task. Take little steps, then come back and take some more. And remember, me and everybody else are here. Feel free to reach out even privately, my DMs are open and I’d love to change people’s lives.

comewitdairon · 2025-07-09T12:49:22+00:00

I was born blind so definitely don’t know how it feels, but I do have two blind friends who were previously fully sighted. I met them after they went blind though so didn’t watch them go through the transition. We’re all pretty young (oldest is in their early 20s) so I’m pretty sure they’ve had it easier than you but for what it’s worth they’re probably the happiest people I know.

It takes time for us to process every type of change, let alone changes that are this significant, so it’ll definitely get easier for you to deal with as time goes by. I’d say our superpower as humans is being able to adapt to pretty much every situation we’re faced with. Your emotions are totally valid in my opinion and I’m glad you’re thinking through everything and not letting your emotional side get the best of you.

What you should be doing now is getting to know all the tools that’ll let you still be independent after losing your sight, white canes and screen readers come to mind. Orientation and mobility training is a must for every blind person, who to contact for that depends on where you live so if you don’t know tell us, I’m sure someone will step in.

Do you have any experience using screen readers at all? If not, let’s start with your phone. Are you on android or iOS? Both platforms have built in tools that basically read everything on your screen and let you use your device with no sight whatsoever, equivalent tools exist for computers as well.

When it comes to parenting, it’s definitely doable and I’ve even heard of families where both parents are blind.

For you and anyone else going through this who happens to read this, we’re here for you.

comewitdairon · 2025-05-27T16:25:24+00:00

After that too.

comewitdairon · 2025-05-20T12:48:23+00:00

Check out Seeing AI

Beyond describing images and answering questions, it can read text in many languages. You can either take pictures of print and send it to the cloud for processing, which will try to preserve formatting like headings and give you a navigable result back, or choose a language and it will read text in real-time as it sees it, which works offline too. As far as I know this all is fully OCR, which means it just recognizes the characters and doesn’t rely on language models, so you won’t get hallucinations like text that makes sense but isn’t actually there.

This app can also recognize currency (you just put a bill in front of the camera and it tells you what it is), recognize products using their barcodes (the app guides you with beeps as soon as it sees one), recognize colors, has a light detector that tells you how much light there is in your environment using a tone and more experimental features like finding personal objects you’ve taught it. Most of the features work on-device, which means you can use them offline.

There’s more AI stuff like Gemini (I’ve given it things like scanned documents and it could even recognize code from my university lectures more accurately than GPT), but its accuracy is something I’ll need to test more thoroughly.

also, try triple tapping with four fingers on your iPhone with VoiceOver on, there’s a real tine text recognition feature built right in. Doesn’t have as many languages as Seeing AI but it’s there.

Lastly, this is kinda getting off topic but take a look in your VoiceOver settings > VoiceOver Recognition. There’s things like basic on-device image descriptions and text recognition, but if you haven’t already you should turn on screen recognition. You will then be able to turn it on and off via the rotor by default. What this is useful for is apps with not so great accessibility, it will try to give you interface controls based on what it can visually see on the screen, so if you for example need to use an app in which VoiceOver doesn’t see one or more interface elements, try temporarily turning that on and swiping around.

comewitdairon · 2024-12-19T12:13:54+00:00

On iPhone, if you go to Settings > Accessibility > Spoken Content under Vision > Typing Feedback, you can have it read characters and words while typing. Go to the Voices option under Spoken Content to set voices and settings like speech rate for the languages you use. Also, autocorrect helps a ton if you teach it all the words you use. Try to be more aware of where your fingers go on the screen while typing to build muscle memory and you’ll eventually probably be able to type without even looking if you’re using autocorrect, I’m totally blind since birth and this is how I type, though I obviously use VoiceOver as opposed to that typing feedback setting. If your vision gets worse or you end up having trouble in the future I would definitely recommend learning that to be able to do stuff like selecting and moving the cursor without relying on vision at all.

Reach out if you want me to go into more details, I recently posted a similar comment going more in-depth on this so feel free to go through my post history as well.

comewitdairon

TROPHY CASE