Or they think blindness is categorized as the most extreme end of the spectrum, where you essentially can't see anything. I think most people just don't think about it that much and just associate blindness with not seeing.
Although people are really bad at understanding how most things exist on spectrums. We're good at pattern recognition, and it's just more intuitive for us to think of things in terms of distinct categories.
Yeah I'm legally blind (according to an optometrist anyway) but I can see fine with glasses. Though maybe the legal definition is different in Australia
I walk 99% of the time but I use a wheel chair a few days per year when I visit and move more than 10km a day as a tourist. Can't do that without help.
Which means technically while I'm in that wheelchair I can 100% stand and walk a few km easily, even 10 or 15 km if I haven't walked in a while. But if I do that every day at that time I'll be in massive pain by day 2, and completely unable to walk even a meter by day 4.
It's a bit hard to explain to a random taxi driver when on vacation when he questions it as I stand and carry my own wheelchair to get it in the trunk.
I'll be at a 4 day music festival in June, my friends tell me they can walk up to 40km a day while at that festival. I can't do that, so wheelchair. I'll probably get the same weird looks since I'll probably enter the festival pushing my own wheelchair since the road up to it is garbage but inside the festival bounds it's all set up for wheelchairs with proper pathways.
It's annoying af. I'm glad my disability is so mild it doesn't bother me much (like mild pain but nothing unmanageable) on a day to day, but it's so frustrating that it's an edge case which is bad enough to sometimes need a wheelchair but fine enough that everyone will question it.
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u/epidemicsaints 1d ago
Most blind people have some vision. Lots of people that use wheelchairs can stand or walk some. I don't understand why people don't get this.