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Comment by feintruled | Hacker News Reader

Braille is an amazing invention. As a sighted person, my fingers can't differentiate the patterns at all but of course that would come with practice. I worked with a guy once who used a Braille terminal and he was just as fast as anyone else. One thing I always wondered with Braille signage and the like - how do you know it is there to touch it? Is there some convention for placement?

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The Guide to ADA Standards provides some info:

> The required location of tactile signs is relatively uniform (i.e., beside or, where permitted, on doors) to make them easier to locate without vision. The height is limited to a specific range (48 inches – 60 inches) to facilitate reading by touch.

So a blind person touches a door frame, and gets a cue to feel for a sign.

https://www.access-board.gov/ada/guides/chapter-7-signs/

Many blind people have enough residual vision to locate the label, but they can't read text for example.

In Germany, the packaging for medicine features Braille that's hard to miss.

Apart from that, I'm sure there are standards and building codes and such that regulate this.

More than 90% of blind people can see the sun. In the us blind means you vision cannot be corrected to better than 20/200, without glasses my vision is worse than that, so if I can do it without glasses some blind can as well. (Of course my vision is correctable to perfection)

Interesting, I only ever imagined blindness to be total darkness and absence of sight. One great example among many of how you can't effectively design accommodations for a particular disability without getting input from someone who has that disability.

Fun fact! Unless you have no eyes or no optic nerve, you'll basically always see something. Even 100% blind people can still see shadows, movement, the sun, etc.

Most of the "blind" definition is around driving and reading.

I'm blind with only light perception, but I cannot see movement or shadows. Another fun fact I guess.

Other blind people see a flashing shifting colorful mess in their field of vision. I know someone who can even mentally control the perception of the visual disruption to an extent, like making it flash different colors.

The visual system from the eye to the brain and everything between is incredibly complex and can fail in all kinds of different ways.

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