October is Blindness Awareness Month. Throughout the world, there are over 285 million people who are visually impaired with 39 million of these people being completely blind. There are degrees of vision loss and folks who are blind or visually impaired often lead fulfilling lives in their communities.

What is Blindness?

There are a wide range of vision levels exhibited in people who are visually impaired and 90% of people who are legally blind have some degree of vision. In order to be considered “legally blind”, one must have a central vision of 20/200 or lower in their best vision eye even with corrective lenses. Worldwide, the leading cause of blindness is cataracts, however the prevalence will vary depending on where you live in the world. Diabetes is a big risk factor, making one 25 times more likely to have visual impairment. In the United States, blindness or low vision affects at least 3.3 million people, with many of these people being older adults.

We are grateful to God to hear the story of one of our own members, Danyelle.  Watch the video below to hear some of her story.

Here's some excerpts from Danyelle's interview:
What accommodations have you appreciated from Friendship:

What's really really helpful is a couple of things I love when choir members in specifically in the alto section, because I'm an alto, they touch my hand and they help me to feel where the choir is moving and what they're doing. And then the other thing that's really helpful is the musicians. They are really helpful with music cues because they're the most that I rely on whenever I'm up singing.

My second time at the word conference this past Saturday, everything was so accommodating. I really had the ability to read everything that everybody else was utilizing on my phone, with the screen reading software that I utilized, and everybody was so helpful because I attended for the first time by myself, and everybody was there to lend a hand, and I didn't have to rely on the fact that because my mom wasn't here, I wasn't able to go.

What's a normal day like for you and how do you use technology to exercise your independence:

Let me give you the short version of day to day. So let's just start with waking up in the morning. I have to decide what clothes I'm going to wear, nobody does it for me. I do it all myself. I have to use my phone or other devices to discover what color clothing is, and almost everything that I have talks. I pretty much use my phone and my glasses to identify what color things are. I have a pair of medical asses they tell me what things look like. And once I do that, I just do your normal everyday things. I use my meta glasses to read various items in print. For example, whenever I'm at a restaurant, I use them to read the menu. I get handed just the regular print menu like everybody else. Just open it like regular, put the glasses on, make sure they pair, and then just say, hey, meta, look and read. And then it snaps a picture and reads everything.

What are some of the challenges:

Being visually impaired or blind has its ups and downs. Every day is not a good day. When I'm not having a good day and I've had a lot of them, I think it mostly stems toward what I said in the beginning. I'm the only blind person in my family, and so I live in this world that a lot of people don't understand, have to constantly explain myself to a lot of people because there's other stereotypes that come with vision loss, one of them being you can't do anything, which is not true because I've mentioned so many tools that are out there that can help me accomplish certain tasks,

Of course I can't drive like your average person. I have to take transportation, which causes a lot of advanced planning that takes a lot of toll mentally, because you're constantly depending on people to do things for you.  even before I come into the church doors, maybe I might have dealt with something at the house that just caused me to feel bad. Maybe it's something as simple as I'm not wearing the proper dress to match my shoes or something. It could be something really small and I could just be like, not wanting to do much of anything because of the fact that I can't see the color of my own clothes, but I have to just keep myself moving and constantly talk to myself and encourage myself

What's one thing you want people to know about those who experience vision loss:

One thing that I would like people to know about people with vision loss is it's not a one size fits all. Everybody has different accommodations. And the number one thing that you can do is just simply ask, how can I help