#light perception

unsure if you've answered something like this before but here goes:

my character is a man in his late 20's that has low vision from Leber Hereditary Optic Neuropathy (LHON). so, my character would have started losing his sight in early adulthood. however, he has the ability to see what are essentially spirits because of how bright they are.

my question is: would it make sense that with his low vision, that he would still be able to see the glow of the spirits he comes across? i would think that he would no longer be able to see them with as much clarity that he used to be able to, but would it make sense for the brightness to still be noticeable after his blindness reaches a certain point? i'm mainly unsure of the range of light and shadows that he would be able to parse, so any input you have would be great.

thanks so much!

This sounds fine to me. I love to see blind characters with remaining vision or light perception. It also makes sense for amount of light perception to decrease with time, but it can also remain stable.

I don’t share this experience, but I will try to help. If anyone would like to add anything please do.

A few things blind people pay attention to might include: tone of voice, volume, fabric shifting indicating movement, light changes, sounds of breath such as sighing, sounds of jewelry or tapping, etc. Pauses or changes in speech can also alert blind people to someone’s mood. Marginalized people are already good at listening to body language or other cues that tell someone’s true feelings and blind people are no exception. Other sounds might include teeth, muffled voice indicating looking down or covering the mouth, or movement of objects. Perhaps the blind character can also feel movement if they are close enough to that person or touching them.

Writing characters with light perception can also involve changes in the room’s light, a character moving in front of a lamp or window, and changes in weather, time of day, or going from an area with few lights to a lot of lights, such as a city.

If you want to write a blind character and you have trouble with this, you could give them low vision or another type of blindness.

You could also write scenes as you normally would and then translate visual cues into auditory, special, or tactile ones, etc.

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