If someone takes a new shape, in what way can we still speak of them as the same person they were before?

How can a thing that causes so much alienation also be a source of growth and joy? How can something that estranges us from so much of the world also bring us closer to it?

I sympathized with all of these positions, even as I wondered which attitudes I would adopt for my own life. I tried to understand how blindness was changing my identity as a reader and a writer, as a husband and a father, as a citizen and an otherwise privileged white guy.

So much of life, and loss, exists in this space between binaries: a divorce that doesn’t end a relationship; a move that brings too much baggage to the new destination; a dying relative who’s no longer alive in the way we remember him, even as he breathes the same air we do for years. As painful as the extreme might be in these situations—severing

In the 1970s, audible pedestrian signals were introduced in the US—those electronic bird chirps that sound when it’s safe to cross an intersection. The NFB came down swiftly against their use, arguing that they reinforced the image of the blind as helpless people who can’t figure out from the sound of traffic when the light has changed. For decades

The CIL group kept iterating. One nondisabled member recalled a particularly steep wheelchair ramp at the entrance to a Berkeley apartment building, which he’d sprinkled with paint and cat litter to give wheelchairs more traction. What if this sort of tactile surface on a curb cut could indicate the transition to the street to a blind pedestrian? T

Though the majority of visually impaired adults are unemployed, several studies found that blind people who use braille have a higher rate of employment and report greater job satisfaction.

It turns out a techno-thriller isn’t meant to be read painstakingly, at an underwater pace. It felt like listening to a punk record at half speed.

1. Seeing Stars There are as many ways of being blind as there are of being tall, or sick, or hot. But the popular view has always conceived of blindness as a totality.