25 Interesting Facts About Blindness

Here are 25 Interesting Facts About Blindness.

1-5 Interesting Facts About Blindness

1. Japanese beer cans have “alcohol” written in braille on the top of the can to prevent blind people from accidently buying beer. – Source

2. No one born blind has ever developed schizophrenia. – Source

3. Blind people can get issued a guide horse. Miniature horses are used instead of guide dogs if the person is for example afraid of, or allergic to, dogs. – Source

4. Red color blind monkeys who underwent gene therapy by having their eyes injected with a red cone, had their color blindness cured, potentially opening a door for curing color blindness in humans. – Source

5. There exist people who can locate objects through echolocation, making it possible for blind people to ride bicycles through traffic. A blind American man named Daniel Kish taught himself to navigate using echolocation. His hobbies include hiking and mountain-biking, and he has now trained over 500 students in his “tongue-click” technique. – Source

6-10 Interesting Facts About Blindness

6. Blind people can smile even though they have never seen anybody else smile. – Source

7. Mr. Rogers made a point of mentioning out loud when he was feeding his fish after he got a letter from a family whose blind daughter asked him to do so, because she couldn’t tell if the fish were being fed. – Source

8. Blind people have four times more nightmares than sighted people. – Source

9. Brian Jacques wrote the Redwall series for the children at the Royal Wavertree School for the Blind in Liverpool, where as a truck driver, he delivered milk. This is the reason for his very descriptive writing style. – Source

10. One time, the US Army used color blind people to spot camouflage colors that fooled those with normal color vision.

11-15 Interesting Facts About Blindness

11. The US Government has rigorous specs for the pens it buys. It has to be assembled by blind people. The pens must be able to write for a mile and in temps 160F to -40, are designed to fit undetected into uniforms. They should be able to stand in for a two inch fuse, and should be able to be used for an emergency tracheotomy. – Source

12. After making 1.4 billion crayons, the senior crayon maker for Crayola admitted that he was color blind. – Source

13. Braille was originally created as a way for Napoleon’s spies to read documents without needing any light. It was Louis Braille that pointed out the flaws of the code which created the version we use today.

14. There are Playboy magazines printed in braille. In fact, the American Council of the Blind successfully sued the Library of Congress to make Playboy available in Braille. – Source

15. Guide dogs for the visually impaired are taught to go to the toilet on command, so that their owners are able to clean it up. – Source

16-20 Interesting Facts About Blindness

16. Blind hiker Bill Irwin completed the Appalachian Trail with the help of his seeing eye dog, after falling ~5,000 times. – Source

17. Blind people experience visual hallucinations when they take LSD. – Source

18. A 15-year-old blind kid was able to use his enhanced hearing to hack telephone systems by perfectly reproducing dial tones. He even went as far as faking calls to the SWAT team in order to have them surround the houses of his enemies. – Source

19. J.D. Salinger never relinquished rights for audiobooks. The only legal way to obtain a Catcher in the Rye audiobook, is to have “permission” from a physician or ophthalmologist to listen to a “legal audiobook” recorded for the Library of Congress, who can do so by law, but only for the blind. – Source

20. The blind get a 50% discount on TV licenses in the UK. – Source

21-25 Interesting Facts About Blindness

21. There is a restaurant in Toronto, Canada called O.Noir where the servers are blind and you dine in complete pitch black darkness. – Source

22. In Japan, they have specific sections of sidewalks textured for blind people’s canes so that they know where shops, subways, and crosswalks are located. – Source

23. Two guide dogs, Salty and Roselle, were awarded the Dickin Medal for gallantry after leading their blind owners out of the World Trade Center during the September 11 attacks. – Source

24. The explosion from the first nuclear weapon test at Trinity was so bright that Georgia Green, a blind woman almost 50 miles away, asked her brother “What’s that light?” – Source

25. Theodore Roosevelt became blind in one eye from an injury suffered during a boxing match, while he was still in the office. – Source