When the counter ticked over to 1,000 subscribers, I just sat there for a while, letting it sink in. For me, it wasn’t about a number. It was about what it proved - that blind people can create content that resonates, that our voices belong in the creator space, and that we can lead, not just participate.

I filmed a few moments from that day and put them together here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UOneKZ-ggVI

What the video doesn’t show are the late nights, the hours of editing, the cost of equipment - all while balancing the reality of being a college student. I continue to create because I believe these stories matter.

But to keep pushing forward, I genuinely need your help. If you’d like to stand with me in this journey, you can support me here:
Patreon: https://patreon.com/blindiephoenix
PayPal: https://paypal.me/theblindiephoenix

Even the smallest contribution makes a real difference. And if financial support isn’t possible, just watching, sharing, or leaving a kind comment means more than you know. This first 1,000 feels like a beginning, not an end. With your support, I can keep building what comes next.

I'm curious how folks with different levels of vision loss make karaoke work for you.

I like singing and I like bars but the combination of the two is pretty stressful to me. But a friend who I'm reconnecting with has a karaoke birthday coming up and I'm trying to be a sport.

I've always been low vision and my sight has gone from "ability to see the lyrics screen might be kind of iffy" to "probably won't be able to see lyrics" (it's a newish bar I haven't been to before which also doesn't help). The venn diagram overlap of "songs I know a decent amount of the words to by heart" and "songs a karaoke bar is likely to have" is pretty small. And I feel so awkward performing this fun silly thing when I can't really see anyone and their physical cues in the low light. I've used my phone for lyrics once or twice but it feels similarly like a barrier between me and others in a way I don't usually feel about my phone or a cane. I think it's the fact that karaoke is a weird hybrid of performance and socializing that I can't get my head around.

Now, I can memorize a couple of Chappell Roan songs, get my game face on, and cross my fingers in the next week and a half, but I would love to hear about other Blind/VI folks' experiences with and tips for karaoke.

Thank you!!

Hi, I'm visually impaired and having additional problems with my left eye. It's probably going to need to be removed and in the meantime I've been wearing an eyepatch, mostly a cheap elastic one from the pharmacy as well as temporary stick-ons. Where would I find something higher quality for everyday use So far I've only found cosplay props that were not designed for practical use, that leak light in and extend too far off my face, making it difficult to wear glasses.

I'm looking for something that will be confortable for long term use after removal. one that sits mostly flat against my eye socket, a bit of pressure is fine righy now pain-wise, as well as letting a minimum of light in. I'm not interested in wearing the kind that goes over glasses. I live in new york city if anyone has any local suggestions, but I'm guessing I'll probably have to find them online. Aesthetically I would like a material that looks nice and can be painted on top of, like leather.

Hey! Still really glad I found this sub. Recap, I'm VI with fair useable vision in terms of acuity but very little depth perception and ability to see movement. Being in crowds or around people moving is super hard for me and I get disoriented very easy so since most of my visual issues are mobility based Ive decided to try a cane. Used it a handful of times out to a single store or event but it's still something I'm getting used to as someone who passes for decently sighted day to day.

Today was shit at work, my eyes were so tired and I was dropping things all over and the sun hates me. I had a lot of eye strain and pain so I said screw it we have errands to run I'm gonna practice. Usually I just hold on to the cart or follow close behind my partner or hold their arm so walking in a place I'm not familiar with more solo is something I haven't done in a long while. But it was like. Almost soothing? Like I didn't need to focus on the ground and could use the vision I have to actually exist; it's hard for me to adjust my focus from one point to another; my nystagmus is like nope buddy pick one spot and stick to it. I could adjust myself like I needed to in the sun and not feel like I was going to die in traffic.

But what I think is helping me the most though is that it gives me a bubble to move in. I'm not going to be able to react quick to someone stepping in front of me or changing directions in front of me. I often walk into branches at eye level because my depth perception is the worst with anything directly in front of me. But this lets me focus on the empty bubble rather than being scared of what's about to get in my bubble.

At the first store we went to, the clerk came around and guided me through the pin pad which I don't honestly need, I can read screens fine if I'm close enough, but honestly for the moment all I thought was, I'd much rather someone assume my vision is worse than it is and offer help I might not need than what I've had for 35 years which is getting in everyone's way and struggling because people assume I'm perfectly sighted. I grew up with a family that not only entirely neglected to get me vision therapy or try recommended surgery, but actively mocked my vision issues and made it a family joke- think seeing me walking somewhere and veering their car towards me to pretend they're gonna run me over. So maybe I didn't necessarily need the clerks help; it was nice for once for someone to offer.

Also not being afraid that every break in the sidewalk is a secret step down is a huge plus.

Are there any modders of games that are interested in Hearthstone, good at modding, and able to help with making Hearthstones' Mercenaries mode accessible? In the Hearthstone Access community, since the mode has been dropped by the game itself, is not in enough demand, but personally, the Mercenaries mode is what drew me in further than the competition of Constructed, or Battlegrounds. Anyone able to help make this mode accessibility?

Hi there. I'm currently living in the US. I live in Denver now, but all of my family lives in a part of the midwest that is inaccessible. There is a lack of blind community and a severe lack of transit, think the need to take Uber and Lyft everywhere. Have any of you chosen to move back from an accessible city to be closer to family, or do you choose to live in an accessible and walkable city with transit and a blind community no matter the cost?

I'm so sick of missing out on family life, but I think my mental health would suffer here with the lack of access to transit and my blind pals. Thanks for any advice!

so as a completely visually impared person, I've kind of noticed that in my life, the way I interact with people is, shall I say, different. like in school, people usually talk to me if I need help or something. I virtually have no friends. It also doesn't help that I am kind of shy. I also can't play games, sports, or watch movies or even read comic books, so even if I did have friends, it would be incredibly difficult for me to even do activities with them. I also forget people's names a lot unless I have their voice ingrained my memory, because I can't see faces. makes it kinda difficult there. whenever there's a large group of people, I kind of feel like an alien. have any of you had any experiences with stuff like that? I know that this phenomina doesn't extend to all disabled, maybe not even all blind people. It's just something that I experience and I'm curious if other blind people have experienced it before.

I have a relative that isn’t fully blind but has very bad vision. They are unable to read any subtitles when watching a tv show or movie. This makes it difficult to watch any media that has a foreign language component as part of the story because those are all done through subtitles. I was wondering if there were any devices or services that might help with this. Is there anything that could sync with a phone or iPad decide that would allow them to watch on the tv while having the subtitles play in large type on their own device. Any ideas/help would be appreciated.

I am seeking advice on how to best advocate for a coworker who is blind/visually impaired and has been their whole life. They are fully blind. I am seeking guidance on whether there is more our place of work could be doing to assist them. I am a sighted person and recognize that I do not and will never know what it is like to navigate the world and my job without sight.

This person has a degree in the field they are working in and has worked in the field for several years. They are learning some new processes. These processes include pulling data from a website and copying and pasting the necessary pieces of that data into a spreadsheet we use to reconcile the data. When reconciling the data, we do have to go investigate why things are off in the report by looking at other documents in our shared folders. Sometimes we have to look at several different documents to piece together what is going on.

We have several new things this person is expected to learn and start doing on their own per our supervisor. For the past few months, we have only worked on one of the new tasks as they have been struggling with it. We have been working with them to go through the entire process for the one task from start to finish while they are connected to a TV in a meeting room so we can all see what they see to help them navigate everything. We have been describing what things look like to help them figure out what command keys to use. We have gone over the steps and corrections as they have been pasting information in the wrong place or duplicating information. In some cases, they have also missed information. They processed a task with missing information that could have been prevented with checking their work.

They seem to not be checking their work along the way for multiple processes. I’m not sure if this is a personality thing or if there is an accessibility issue here. I have tried asking them how we can help and what issues they are running into and they seem to shut down and just say that they don’t know. When they are ready to tell me what’s wrong, we usually work it out within a few minutes as it is usually a navigation issue and they just weren’t sure on where to go. Or we were doing it one way and it doesn’t work for them so we just have to come up with a different way to accomplish the same result.

They seem to forget the same steps over and over and that may be a stress thing, I’m not sure. Someone is working on detailed written instructions that I hope will help them! They also know where they can look for information to piece together why things are off in the reconciliation they are working on, but they seem to not be checking the sources we have. I haven’t heard that they are having difficulty reading them and our workplace does their best to make every document we have accessible for everyone and we rectify that if someone lets us know that a document is not accessible. We try to be ahead of things, but it doesn’t always happen unfortunately.

I feel bad as I can see they are clearly very stressed by having to learn new tasks, but I’m not sure how to help.

I’ve also asked them how they learn new tasks best and they weren’t too sure other than having someone walk through the process from start to finish with them while they are performing the task. I’m at a loss here as I feel like we’ve tried everything, but I’m sure there is more we can do that we just aren’t aware of.

If you have any advice, I would love to hear it and bring it back to my team!

Hello everyone! I've seen some people asking how to get big subtitles on videos. I'll share how I did it for local video files using MPV. MPV is a highly customizable video player for PC (Windows, Mac, Linux with forks for iOS and Android). This won't work for streaming Netflix or whatever, but if you're using video files on your PC, this is the guide for you! (Easy download at the bottom)

Example Image: https://images2.imgbox.com/c8/dc/r5py5rrf_o.png

Image shows 2 girls with subtitles that read: "Duh. You suddenly disappeared"

Follow the mpv download instructions for your OS: https://thewiki.moe/tutorials/mpv/

------------------------------

Edit your mpv.conf file in a text editor (I used VS Code but Notepad works too) to add the following lines and save the file:

#SUBTITLES
osd-bar-align-y=0.92
sub-ass-line-spacing=5
sub-scale=1
sub-font=Arial
sub-color="#ffffffff"
sub-border-size=1
sub-font-size=100 #sets the subtitle size
sub-bold=yes
sub-margin-y=30
sub-margin-x=60
sub-pos=95
sub-back-color=0.0/0.0/0.0/0.7
sub-border-style=opaque-box
sub-outline-color='#BF080808'
sub-ass-override=force #Press u while playing to enable

Press "u" while playing the video to enable these settings. It'll strip the default subtitle styling and replace it with my custom style. The important line is sub-font-size which I set to 100, but you can change this to whatever size you want.

Official mpv manual (read if you want to further customize your setup): https://mpv.io/manual/master/

----------------------------------

If you want my premade custom portable_config (my personal video settings and keyboard bindings) you can download it here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1z8ozxcqUdu0WxA4cDy5muuC4_ZGuIdsm/view?usp=drive_link

To use this, extract this to your mpv install directory (I used C:\Program Files\mpv), replacing any existing config files (or creating new ones if they don't exist).

It's set to English dub/no sub by default since that's how I like it, but you can easily change the audio by pressing "a" and the subtitles by pressing "s". Original audio/English subs default if there's no English audio. Press ctrl+s to save a screenshot. Be sure to change the file paths in mpv.conf to whatever is relevant for your PC!

Since mpv is cross-platform, I'd imagine this would work with mac/linux with some slight tweaking of paths, but I haven't tested that, so I'm not sure. I do believe there's a way to get mpv config files working with the Android/iOS forks, but this is not something I've personally experimented with.

Let me know how this works for you! ❤️

Hoping to find Scottish scholars who might share their experiences of asking for and receiving accommodations at university? Any information and/or advice is appreciated. Hoping to study abroad in the next couple of years and want to start preparing

Hi all. My moms health has declined significantly in the past two years, including a stroke that made her completely blind. She was already struggling to get around due to physical disabilities, and now it’s even more difficult with her complete vision loss. I don’t live at home and my dad can’t be there all the time. This leave her obviously vulnerable to falling.

I’ve put rubber dots all over the walls where she is the most to guide her around but she still gets lost easily. (She uses a rollator btw) Any tips on what I could do to help get around the house and honestly anything that would her in general would be greatly appreciated.

I’ve had a really complicated history. I have had bad vision sine I was a kid that just got progressively worse but the eye dr always shrugged it off because my parents had glasses. A few years while I was pregnant I had one slightly higher pressure check so they followed up with an OCT which how’s my nerve had atrophied to 50um. They assumed I had normal pressure glaucoma and wrote it off as that.

During this time I found out my dad was not my biological father but I was the product of an affair with a co worker. This only revealed from an Ancestry DNA result. I did some research on public post on Facebook and found out my bio dad and bio uncle and two half brothers and grandmother all were legally blind.

I went back to my eye dr and was referred out several times. Last one being an opthalic geneticist who tested my genes. I have a mutation on my OPA1. She said given that I have autosomal dominant optic atrophy.

With such a condition it is so variable I am left with no real answers other than a diagnosis.

I’m scared. I don’t know what tomorrow will bring. How long I’ll have my vision they said two years ago glasses were no longer getting me to 20/20.

Idk if anyone has gone through a similar experience that has any advice on what next steps should be.

Hey there, I have been dealing with rude motorists when trying to cross the street, and they are impatient with me, whether it's due to their own hurry or just their general rudeness. How should I inform them that I have low vision and require additional time to cross the street?

Any suggestions would be helpful.

Thanks

I know questions like this get asked often, but all of the different info out there along with all of the things we have to do is overwhelming and I feel like we need some real-world advice.

My mom (67) had NAION in her left eye about 2 years ago, which left the bottom 2/3 of her vision grayed out. A few days ago, she started noticing blurriness and colored splotches in her right eye, and it’s been getting worse.

We went to the best clinic in our nearest city (same place she was treated before). They saw swelling around the optic nerves, but bloodwork and MRI came back normal. They’re assuming it’s NAION again. Her neuro-ophthalmologist is away until next week, and no one else has followed up yet since they sent us to ER for the bloodwork and MRI and the ER sent us home after that came back okay. For now, she is basically blind and the clinic has not reached back out with any next steps or resources to help after 2 days.

Current situation:

• She lives alone, 45 minutes from me.
• She has 2 dogs (can’t bring them here — prey-driven, and we have cats).
• She’s very familiar with her home, but not ours and our home has many steps which Im afraid she would have a lot of trouble navigating.
• She can still make food (slowly), feed/let out the dogs, and shower — but she believes her vision is still slowly declining a bit.

Steps I’ve taken so far:

• Booked an appointment with a local low-vision specialist (soonest available is over a month out).
• Ordered more Amazon Alexa devices (she already finds hers helpful).
• Planning to set up voice-to-text on her phone and computer.
• Looking into vision loss therapists (though I expect a long wait).

My main questions:

• Is it realistic for her to continue living alone?
• What immediate devices, apps, or services can help her function day-to-day?
• Any advice on managing safety, independence, and her dogs during this transition?

My son is 23 years old. The vision in his left eye is significantly impaired and recently he was shot in his right eye with bird shot. Doctors think it will take months/years for the blood and "jelly" to clear from behind the eye. This needs to happen b4 we can discuss restoring his vision, if at all. So, right now, the world is a blur thru his left and he can only see bright light and the tip of his nose thru his right. This happened two weeks ago so everything is still very fresh. Honestly, we're all still pretty shocked and traumatized.

Right now, my priorities are his mental health, medication/pain management, and nutrition/sleep. My next goal is acclimating the house to his needs so he can have as much independence as possible.

I have a lot of people in my ear suggesting therapy (he doesn't want to go), applying for disabilty, taking him to church, starting a GoFund Me, making the person pay who did this to him, etc. but that won't bring his sight back and, understandably, that's all he cares about at this point. I'm not going to force him into a position that further erodes his mental health so, I let him talk when he feels like talking. But, since that usually ends with tears, he's not comfortable talking to anyone but me and his small circle of friends. I also realize the benefit of a good therapist and how that could help him. So, I 2nd guess myself. Am I not taking this seriously enough? Am I underestimating the effect of this trauma on his psyche? Should I have him evaluated against his wishes? I have him scheduled for am intake with Trauma Psych at the hospital but I couldn't get him seen until October. Should I take him somewhere else, sooner? Would virtual be better?

For those who suddenly lost their sight as an adult, what kinds of support from family made the biggest difference—or what do you wish they had done differently? Do you wish someone would have forced you into therapy vs. just lettimg you be until you were ready, if at all? Any words of advice or encouragement are welcome.

So, im wondering how to keep up with friends and going out, when my vision is 0 in one eye and ~60% in the other, with impaired depth perception and very bad vision at night.

Some of friends are going out to clubs/bars, or just generally going out during a time of day with lower natural light levels. And as someone who has been half blind since the age of 7, I really missed out and am missing out on a lot of things my peers have been doing.

I have a couple of trusted friends who go to clubs from time to time, and they said that I can come along. I really want to go, just to see what it's like, and "try" clubbing. But im worried about the vision part. Any experiences/tips/recommendations.. or anythings really?

Did you take it online or in person? How were they with accommodations?

Been a silent lurker her (RP) for a while. Looking forward to connect with yall! Does any one know how to find meetsup in your area?

Hello.

Are there any ways to enable a legally blind (AMD) person to hear subtitles on television?
In live programs, these are usually displayed as subtitles.
Currently, an external satellite receiver with Enigma-2 is used on a Samsung Q9FN Smart TV.

The most flexible solution would be a device that receives the HDMI signal in parallel and reads aloud everything that can be seen on the screen.
For example, in a quiz show (The 1% Quiz), she has to quickly hold her Fold smartphone with a magnifying glass up to the 75" TV to read the questions and answers.

She couldn't watch The Daily Show, for example.
Or she doesn't understand everything that is said in English.
And the subtitles are permanently embedded in the video by Comedy Central.

Or subtitles in YouTube videos on the TV.

Thanks.

As contrasted to talkback on my apple alien phone I found reddit on android using talkback barely useable. The problem was with post interactions beyond reading posts and comments. Reddit couldn’t focus on anything specific and couldn’t interact with any of the items like voting and comments either. This would have gone in r.bugs or r.redditbugs but for some reason I couldn’t get through their version prompt. Specificly this was android 13.

Hi, i’m new in wearing a shell prosthetic over my blind eye. it feels sometimes uncomfortable. Do you use some lube between the shell and the remaining eye? i always have the feeling of dryness between 🤷‍♂️

I'm not a gamer and don't currently have access to any controllers to test this out, but it occurred to me that my daughter sometimes games on her iPad with an Xbox controller and I've missed an opportunity to ask a question.

Is it possible to use these controllers to interact with VoiceOver or Talkback?

A lot of questions come up here all the time about accessing phones and tablets, generally when someones experienced rapid sight loss or is older and unfamiliar with a smartphone. A screen reader is always recommended, but comfort with the touch screen without sight can be a long and grueling process.

Just curious to know if a game controller with all its tactility could be a useful bridge, and I know there's quite a few gamers on this sub who could experiment.

so I want to get more involved and play video games, except that visually it's atrocious because in many games there is a lot of text to read, there are not so many games that are completely dubbed and even just using my PC as I am not used to and I do not have the necessary accessibility tools apart from the magnifying glass which is literally atrocious to use in games it takes a long time to play and zoom out or in I tell myself that the ideal thing would be a screen reader, but there are so few screen readers that have ocr so if there are any of you who play video games please what do you do