Blindness is the condition of lacking visual perception due to physiological or neurological factors.
Total blindness is the complete lack of form and light perception and is clinically recorded as "NLP," an abbreviation for "no light perception.
In order to determine which people may need special assistance because of their visual disabilities, various governmental jurisdictions have formulated more complex definitions referred to as legal blindness.
Eye injuries, most often occurring in people under 30, are the leading cause of monocular blindness (vision loss in one eye).
Visually impaired and blind people have devised a number of techniques that allow them to complete daily activities using their remaining senses.
Recent access technology such as screen reading software enable the blind to use mainstream computer applications including the Internet.
Listed below are well known people who had or have a vision impairment including total blindness, sight conditions, and blindness in one eye.
Famous Sight Impaired People:
Helen Keller - (1880 - 1968) - Helen Adams Keller (June 27, 1880 – June 1, 1968) was an American author, activist and lecturer. She was the first deaf/blind person to graduate from college. She was not born blind and deaf; it was not until nineteen months of age that she came down with an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain", which could have possibly been scarlet fever or meningitis. The illness did not last for a particularly long time, but it left her deaf and blind. Keller went on to become a world-famous speaker and author. She is remembered as an advocate for people with disabilities amid numerous other causes.
Stevie Wonder - (born Steveland Hardaway Judkins on May 13, 1950, name later changed to Steveland Hardaway Morris), is an American singer-songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, and record producer. Blind from infancy, Wonder signed with Motown Records as a pre-adolescent at age twelve, and continues to perform and record for the label to this day. It is thought that he received excessive oxygen in his incubator which led to retinopathy of prematurity, a destructive ocular disorder affecting the retina, characterized by abnormal growth of blood vessels, scarring, and sometimes retinal detachment.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt - (January 30, 1882 – April 12, 1945) Franklin was the 32nd President of the United States of America and played a big role during World War II. Roosevelt eventually aided the poor and un-employed of America and restored order at various times during his Presidency. He was also the only President to ever get elected 4 years in a row mostly because of his help for the recovery of the economy. It has been said that Roosevelt had several disabilities including vision impairment.
Harriet Tubman - (c. 1820 – 10 March 1913) Harriet Tubman was a slave throughout her youth, being treated as an animal until she eventually escaped captivity. When she had reached Canada she did not stay to enjoy her freedom. She returned to the lands and brought hundreds of black slaves back to safety, saving them from slavery by escaping from what they then called The Underground Railroad. After a severe wound to the head, which was inflicted by a slave owner before her escape, she became victim to vision impairment and seizures. Which did not keep her from tossing her fears aside and to keep fighting for the freedom of her people.
Louis Braille - (January 4, 1809 – January 6, 1852) Louis Braille became blind after he accidentally stabbed himself in the eye with his father's awl. He later became an inventor and designed braille writing, which enables blind people to read through feeling a series of organized bumps representing letters. This concept was beneficial to all blind people from around the world and is commonly used even today. If it were not for Louis Braille's blindness he may not have invented this method of reading and no other blind person could have enjoyed a story or been able to comprehend important paperwork.
Alec Templeton - (July 4, 1909, March 28, 1963) was a satirist and pianist who had moved from Wales to the United States where he played with several orchestras, eventually making it to his first radio performances on the Rudy Vallee Show, The Chase and Sanbourn Hour,The Magic Key and Kraft Music Hall. The way he would memorize his scripts before the show was by asking someone to read them 20 times in a row while he would listen. He was blind from birth but it did not stop him to doing what he wanted to do in the end.
Galileo Galilei - (15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642) Galileo Galilei was a Tuscan (Italian) astronomer, mathematician, physicist, and philosopher being greatly responsible for the scientific revolution. Some of his accomplishments include improvements to the telescope, accelerated motion and astronomical observations. Galileo was the first to discover the four largest satellites of Jupiter which were named the Galilean moons in his honor. Galileo had also improved compass design and eventually opposed the geocentric view. His sight started to deteriorate at the age of 68 years old and eventually leaded to complete blindness.
Andrea Bocelli - (born 22 September 1958) Andrea Bocelli had become blind at the age of 12 years old following a football accident in which he was hit in the head. At 6 years old Bocelli was taking piano lessons before also learning the saxophone and the flute. His family would always ask him to sing, bocelli once said "I don't think a singer decides to sing, it is the others who choose that you sing by their reactions". Bocelli has sung with other great singers such as Pavarotti and has only been further admired due to his blindness.
John Milton - (December 9, 1608 – November 8, 1674)John Milton was a civil servant, English poet and prose polemicist. Milton was well known through his epic poem Paradise Lost and also for his radical views on republican religion. He never was well adjusted in school and once got expelled for having a fist fight with his tutor. Eventually he began to write poetry in English, Latin and Italian. John Milton became blind at the age of 43 in 1651, and has written books containing quotes of how the experience sometimes made him miserable.
James Thurber - (December 8, 1894–November 2, 1961) James Thurber was a comedian and cartoonist most known for his contributions to New Yorker Magazine. While playing with his brothers William and Robert, William shot him in the eye with and arrow while playing a game of William Tell making him almost completely blind after the loss of an eye. At school James could not play sports with his friends due to this accident so he decided to work on his creative mind, putting his skills in writing.
Claude Monet - also known as Oscar-Claude Monet or Claude Oscar Monet (November 14, 1840 – December 5, 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise. His popularity and fame grew. By 1907 he had painted many well-known paintings, but by then he had “his first problem with his eyesight.” He started to go blind. He still painted, though his eyes got worse. He wouldn’t stop painting until he was nearly blind. In the last decade of his life Monet, nearly blind, painted a group of large water lily murals (Nymphéas) for the Musée de l'Orangerie in Paris.
Horatio Nelson - (29 September 1758 – 21 October 1805) Horatio was a British admiral and was one of the first to go against the conventional tactics of his time by cutting through the enemy's lines in the Napoleonic Wars. Horatio became blind in one eye early in his Royal Navy career, he would use his blindness as cockiness during certain fights. In those days a retreat or surrender was shown via a system of signal flags, when friendly or enemy ships would display the flags Horatio would bring his telescope to his blind eye and say carry on with the attack, I see no signals.
Abdurrahman Wahid - former President of Indonesia (1940- )
Al Hibbler
Arnolt Schlick - blind as an adult - no records of his childhood.
Audre Lorde - Poet - Activist (1934 - 1992)
Bernard Morin - (1931) - mathematician who made important contributions to topology - blind since age 6
Blind Lemon Jefferson - (1893 - 1929) - Blues musician & singer
Blind Willie McTell - (1901 - 1959)
Brandon Jardine - was stabbed in the eyes by his parents with red hot pokers in 1991.
Clarence Carter - (born 1936)
David Blunkett - (born 1947) - British ex-cabinet minister
Denise Leigh - opera singer and winner of Channel 4's Operatunity
Doc Watson - folk guitarist - blinded by a childhood eye infection at the age of one.
Dorothea Lange - Photographer (1895 - 1965)
Dr William Moon - inventor of Moon system of reading
Eamon de Valera - (1882 - 1975) - President of Ireland.
Eduard Degas - French painter
Ella Fitzgerald - (1917 - 1996) - jazz singer - went blind as a result of diabetes in her old age.
Enrico Dandolo - (died 1205) - doge of Venice - blind from trauma.
Esmond Knight - British actor
Esref Armagan - realistic painter - blind since birth.
Francesco Landini - 14th century Italian composer; blind from childhood - from smallpox.
Fritz Lang - (1890 - 1976) - nearly blind at the end of his life
Francisco Goya - (1746 - 1828) - painter - became blind and deaf in late life - painted blind(ed) subjects.
Frankie Armstrong - English folk singer and voice teacher - sight degraded in late teens onwards from glaucoma
Frederick Delius - (1862 - 1934) - became blind later in life after contracting syphilis
Frida Kahlo - Artist (1907 - 1954)
George Shearing - (1919 - ) - jazz pianist.
Gilbert Montagn
Ginny Owens - Gospel singer - totally blind from age 2
Harilyn Rousso - Disability Rights Activist/Psychotherapist (1946-)
Henry Fawcett - UK Postmaster General - 19th Century
Homer - Greek poet said to have been blind.
Honor Daumier - (1808 - 1879) - French caricaturist - painter - and sculptor - blind later in life.
Isaac the Blind - (1160 - 1235) - French cabbalist (possibly blind from birth)
Isaac - biblical patriarch
James Joyce - (1882 - 1941) - writer - at times blind - underwent several operations
Jessica Callahan - singer - blind from retinopathy of prematurity
Jhamak Ghimire - Nepalese Poet and Writer (1980)
Joaquin Rodrigo - composer - from an illness at age three
Johann Sebastian Bach - (1685 - 1750) - became blind in later life.
John II of Aragon - (1397 - 1479) - able to see again after cataract surgery (couching) by Abiathar Crescas
John Stanley - composer - became partially blind as the result of a domestic accident at age 2
John Wesley Powell - Explorer - Geologist (1834 - 1902)
Jorge Luis Borges - became blind in old age from a hereditary condition
Jose Feliciano - (born 1945) - blind from birth due to congenital glaucoma
Joseph Plateau - (1801 - 1883) - physicist - blind due to retinal exposure to sunlight.
Joseph Pulitzer - (1847 - 1911) - publisher - blind at 43 from retinal detachement
Joshua Reynolds - (1723 -1792) - British painter - blind later in life.
Judy Heumann - Assistant Secretary of Education (1947)
Kelvin Tan Weilian - Singaporean singer - became almost totally blind after late-teens
King John the Blind of Bohemia - (1309 - 1346)
Leonhard Euler - (1707 - 1783) - mathematician and physicist.
Marla Runyan - (1969 -) - Olympic long-distance runner - diagnosed with Stargardt's disease at the age of 9
Mike May - (born 1954) - regained partial vision due to stem cell research.
Omar Abdel-Rahman - religious leader and terrorist
Rahsaan Roland Kirk - (1935 - 1977) - blind jazz saxophonist - perhaps best known for his ability to play more than one saxophone at once.
Ray Charles - (1930 - 2004) - blind from glaucoma after age 7.
Ronnie Milsap
Rt Hon David Blunkett - MP - politician
Samson - Biblical character - blinded by the Philistines
Sidney Bradford - (1906 - 1960) - went blind at 10 months of age - regained sight after a cornea transplant at the age of 52
St. Paul - Apostle
Stalebread Lacombe - Jazz musician - went blind in middle age
Sue Townsend - registered blind in mid 2001 due to a diabetic condition she has suffered from for 20 years.
Surdas - a Hindu poet - saint and musician of India
Thomas Gore - (1870 - 1949) - went blind from childhood accident
Thomas Rhodes Armitage - founder of RNIB
Tilly Aston - (187 - 1947) - Australian disability activist who founded Association for the Advancement of the Blind in 1895. Vision impaired from birth - blind at 7 years of age.
Tim Cordes
Tom Wiggins (1849 -1908)
W.C. Handy - (1873 -1958) - Blues composer - went blind in middle age
William Prescott - historian - from childhood blind in one eye - severe visual impairment in other eye
Wilma Mankiller - Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (1945-)
NOTE: Disabled World has assembled this list from both online and offline resources. If you know of a discrepancy in this article please contact us so we can ammend the entry.
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