Welcome

I’m Hannah Fairbairn and this is my blog. I’m here to help you with questions you have about personal, home, and social life with vision loss. Comment on any post, email me, or subscribe to receive occasional email updates:

Hannah@VisionLossAndPersonalRecovery.com

When You Can’t Believe Your Eyes

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My book WHEN YOU CAN’T BELIEVE YOUR EYES: VISION LOSS & PERSONAL RECOVERY is available now in print and accessible versions. It is the first ever guide to coping with sight loss written directly for people dealing with vision impairment and blindness and their families.

Speak Up Skills

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The new Speak Up Skills page focuses on an essential issue for people who live with low vision or blindness: How to get your needs met when talking to people who see well and have never thought about not seeing.

Vision Loss and Personal Recovery

Water Gardening by Touch


Last week’s interview was about people who live with blindness finding vastly expanded possibilities in their other senses. Here is an example in this guest post on touch and sound used for business and pleasure by Doug Rose. My sighted wife and I have been water gardening as a hobby and as a business for […]

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The Word “Blind” Is Still Misused in Everyday Speech- Let’s Get Rid of It Re-Post from 7 years ago … and it’s still going on!


“Time-blindness” was recently targeted on TikTok as “ablest,” and I agree! Blindness is a physical and sensory condition related to the eyes and sometimes the brain. To use the term in this way objectivizes blindness and blind people. There are contexts where “blind” means an object or set-up which blocks vision such as “window blind,” […]

Read more "The Word “Blind” Is Still Misused in Everyday Speech- Let’s Get Rid of It Re-Post from 7 years ago … and it’s still going on!"

Repost, What’s in a Name? Eye Problems? Losing Vision? Going Blind?


I am re-posting this blogpost from the earliest months of  Vision Loss and Personal Recovery to remind people losing sight and their partners about the emotional adjustment the family will go through. Our brains start to adapt almost immediately, it’s our emotions  that lag behind and need all kinds of support to adapt. This difficulty […]

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Marking Your TV Remote


We are all turning on the TV as we wait for spring and vaccinations. But how to mark the buttons you want when bump dots won’t stick? How to mark them depends on whether you have low vision and whether your fingertips work well. And even with a well-marked remote traversing channels, Roku, and streaming […]

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