Congenital blindness

Abstract

Losing one’s sight after having lived for years as a sighted person presents the individual with an extraordinary variety of difficulties, which have now been examined in some detail. However, being born without sight presents the person with a completely different set of problems, many of which have gone unappreciated. The main problem for us as sighted people is that of understanding what it must be like to live in a sighted world without ever having been able to share a set of sensory experiences with the majority of those who inhabit it. Thus one of the primary difficulties we have when dealing with the independence needs of a congenitally blind person is that of not being able to enter into their world of experience. This effectively places a communication barrier between us and our client.