#or 'my glasses are all smudged it'll be a minor pain to clean so I don't want to wear them rn. but this means I'm going to have trouble

[goldpilot22]

My dad is very nearsighted and is legally blind without his glasses but can see just fine with them - he is the type of person who has to use touch to feel around for his glasses if he loses them. (He also has something going on where his pupils are always slightly too dilated? Which means he has to wear sunglasses while driving in the day, and dislikes driving at night because of the glare from lights, but really enjoys astronomy since he can see the stars very well.) Meanwhile I'm slightly nearsighted, worse in one eye than the other, but it's mild enough that I spent my entire time at college without wearing glasses and only started wearing them again last year when I realized the lack of depth perception was affecting my art. (I'd thought my good eye was slightly farsighted, but it was actually slightly nearsighted, and that mixup meant that my glasses gave me headaches so I didn't like wearing them.)

My mom is hard of hearing because her birth father would hit her on the ears when she was a kid (Grandma divorced that man for her kids' safety, and he's not in the picture no more.) and she sometimes has to ask people to repeat things. I'm technically not HoH afaik, but I have tinnitus and auditory hypersensitivity (the sound of a door shutting just normally is enough to hurt a little, for example) so I wear headphones constantly to muffle all sounds and make things bearable. Because of the headphones and my other auditory processing struggles, it's functionally like I'm hard of hearing, as I often have to ask people to repeat things they said, and especially in loud situations I can't just remove the headphones to hear better.

My grandpa (who I live with and help care for) is hard of hearing and wears hearing aids. Sometimes we have a "conflicting access needs" moment when his hearing aids feedback and produce sounds that are painful to me even through my headphones, but the feedbacking bothers him too so he finds a way to get it to stop pretty soon. We frequently have to ask each other to repeat things or get closer and then repeat things, which can be a bit annoying but we're used to it.

also sometimes we have funny moments such as when I asked "You don't have your hearing aids in, do you?" and he said "I can't hear you! I don't have my hearing aids in!"

For any creatives out there who may need it, this is a fairly important thing to note. Bc shockingly I still see genuine mainstream media still be really sloppy about this topic:

In people who are classified as blind or deaf, there's actually very few cases where it's this, all engulfing complete sensory deprivation. What I mean by this is, that someone can be considered blind if they for example lack peripheral vision so severely that they have to actively focus something on the very center of their field to really make out what it is. Or the other way around. Or that their vision is really blurry. Or their eyes can't focus on the same thing, or dozens of other ways people Can't See Well. Same for deafness: someone's hearing can just be so poor that they can't function the same way that non HOH people can. It can mean that one ear is deaf and the other is normal, it can be just hearing if something is really loud or only being able to hear when there's no background noise. The list goes on.

The way blindness and deafness manifests is extremely diverse but I only ever see media do the "Literally complete darkness" for blind characters and "Wouldn't hear a fucking car coming at them until they see the headlights" type of shit for deaf characters. It's so boring and idiotic. Like duh sensory disabled people can rely on other senses or methods to navigate the world but it also doesn't automatically mean blind people have amazing hearing or whatever else played out archetypes writers like to give disabled characters to make them ~more capable~. Like please don't have the range be either "Pathetically helpless" or "Superhero with one sense missing but that makes them More Special".

Deaf people feel soundwaves and vibrations just like hearing people do, blind people can detect the difference between light and dark, and also feel vibrations and air passage to know when someone or something is there. Now I'm not blind nor HOH but even I know that in most cases it's not that black and white. Blind and deaf characters can be perceptive without being supernaturally talented in other ways ffs. Just realise that it's A Spectrum.