MetaFilter posts tagged with blindness and blind

Man recovers vision after 12 years by implanting tooth in eye

scrutiny — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 22:21:06 -0800

Recently, a man's sight was returned to him after losing it for 12 years. How did he do it? Surgeons drilled a hole through one of his canines, put a lens in it, and implanted the construct in his eye. The specific surgery is called Osteo-Odonto-Keratoprosthesis and was first pioneered in Italy in 1963. Essentially, a tooth and a small portion of the jaw is removed from the patient. A small hole is drilled into the tooth and a lens is attached inside. The tooth construct is implanted in the cheek to allow it develop a blood supply, and then later is implanted into the eye. Despite how unwieldy this procedure seems, it has a shockingly high success rate over time. In this survey of 181 patients, 85% retained functional use of their eye after 18 years, with approximately 55% retaining the best postoperative functionality.

Visually impaired photographers

mediareport — Sun, 28 Jan 2007 22:33:57 -0800

"I'm photography's degree zero." Evgen Bavcar takes interesting photos despite being blind. "Naturally there are certain adjustments I have made to the camera" [quicktime]. He's also far from alone. [first link via the Athanasius Kircher Society] [more inside]

hearing is seeing

flapjax at midnite — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 08:25:51 -0800

Echolocation : bats use it. So do whales and dolphins. And humans? The 14-year-old profiled here and here is using it. Learn more about how blind people are employing perception and processing of the auditory environment: where words like flash and tags have an altogether different meaning.

Seeing is not always believing.

cenoxo — Sat, 17 Jun 2006 01:59:45 -0800

'Twas blind, but now I see? — Virgil surgically regained his sight after nearly 50 years of blindness: "On the day he returned home after the bandages were removed, his house and its contents were unintelligible to him, and he had to be led up the garden path, led through the house, led into each room, and introduced to each chair." In the end, he and others like him [PDF] would have rather stayed in the Country of the Blind. (A happier ending was the more recent case of Mike Mays, previously posted here.)

The gift of sight

grahamwell — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 12:54:32 -0800

The gift of sight is easy to take for granted. Not for Mike May, blinded in infancy, Mike had partial vision restored at the age of 43. This is his journal, written with infectious delight for his new gift and documenting the unexpected problems that the miracle brings. There's much, much more to vision than just the data and Mike is an unprecedented opportunity to better understand how perception works. [via the Guardian and previously mentioned here]

and the blind could see

The Jesse Helms — Thu, 08 May 2003 12:59:00 -0800

'Bionic eye' breakthrough can allow the blind to see. One by one the miracles of Jesus are replaced by science.

GriffX — Wed, 14 Aug 2002 14:19:49 -0800

Virtual light - "...the wires plug into Patient Alpha's head like a pair of headphones plug into a stereo. The actual connection is metallic and circular, like a common washer. So seamless is the integration that the skin appears to simply stop being skin and start being steel." Cameras that jack into a blind man's brain, allowing him to 'see' may soon be here.

mathowie — Thu, 04 Nov 1999 16:32:24 -0800

The BBC, working with the Royal National Institute for the Blind, has created a perl script that reparses a page, stripping out the text from tables and reorganizing it on the fly. It creates a pretty good visually impaired-friendly version of your pages instantly. I don't know how well it does on complex page layouts, but compare the BBC News site in its typical state to the parsed 'text-only' version, and you can see they are pretty close in terms of content.