Ideas worth spreading

Blindness isn't a tragic binary — it's a rich spectrum

917,786 views |

Andrew Leland |

TED Studio

• July 2023

When does vision loss become blindness? Writer, audio producer and editor Andrew Leland explains how his gradual loss of vision revealed a paradoxical truth about blindness -- and shows why it might have implications for how all of us see the world.

When does vision loss become blindness? Writer, audio producer and editor Andrew Leland explains how his gradual loss of vision revealed a paradoxical truth about blindness -- and shows why it might have implications for how all of us see the world.

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About the speaker

Andrew Leland

Writer, audio producer, teacher

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Andrew Leland's work often explores the experience of disability, including his transition from sightedness to blindness -- and his quest to learn about blindness as a rich culture all its own.

Andrew Leland | Penguin Press, 2023 | Book

The Country of the Blind: A Memoir at the End of Sight

Georgina Kleege | Oxford University Press, 2018 | Book

More Than Meets the Eye: What Blindness Brings to Art

Kleege is one of the most important and influential blind intellectuals in the US and all of her books are crucial documents for understanding the complexity and richness of the blind experience. More Than Meets the Eye, her most recent book, provocatively and persuasively argues for the inclusion of blind people in culture’s most visual domains, from TV to art museums.

Rodney Evans | IMBD, 2019 | Watch

Vision Portraits

Evans is a filmmaker with Retinitis Pigmentosa and his 2019 documentary weaves together his own experience of gradually losing sight with his encounters with three blind artists, documenting their adjustment to blindness. It's a beautiful demonstration of the ways that disability can nourish creativity.

Jorge Luis Borges | Penguin Books, 2000 | Book

Blindness from Selected Non-Fictions: Volume 3"

Some people carry a copy of the US Constitution around in their pockets everywhere they go; I carry Borges on blindness around in my head. The Argentinian author of mind-bending essays, poems, and short stories (many of which — The Garden of Forking Paths; The Aleph— are classics of Spanish literature) went blind in his forties, in the middle of his writing career. He continued working, dictating to amanuenses, including his mother. This lecture, delivered late in his life, describes blindness in terms that lend it a feeling of gravitas, and a Borgesian feeling of infinite possibility. "Blindness has not been for me a total misfortune; it should not be seen in a pathetic way," Borges said. "It should be seen as a way of life: one of the styles of living."

Alice Wong | Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2020 | Book

Disability Visibility: First-Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century

Disability is a surprisingly rich subject, intersecting with race, gender, class, politics, art, pop culture, food and on and on. No one captures this wild, beautiful diversity of disability better than Alice Wong, a writer, editor and activist based in Northern California. Through her podcast Disability Visibility — and this anthology of the same name — I’ve encountered so many brilliant disabled thinkers who have again and again transformed the way I think about bodies, minds, access and ability.

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Explore Bookshare's free library of content for people with dyslexia, blindness, cerebral palsy and other reading barriers.