A little bit of clarification:
Personally, I do not like any of those terms like “low vision“ or “visually impaired“ or “optically precluded“ or what have you, because frankly, most of those terms were created by sighted people, the sighted people who categorize and label is based on how much residual vision we have, creating a twisted hierarchy of “normal“ and “functional“ entirely based on how much vision we have left, something that is entirely false and incredibly damaging to every blind person’s psyche.
It does not, and I repeat it absolutely does NOT matter how much residual vision you have in the slightest. Every single blind or low vision person is capable of the exact same things, and more vision does not make you better or better off or more capable and less vision does not make you worse and worse off or less capable at all. A totally blind person can do everything just as efficiently and effectively as somebody who barely even crosses the threshold into legal blindness, because with the right skills, tools, confidence, and resources, any level of blindness can be reduced to no more than a mirror inconvenience, and that is entirely true.
So frankly, I don’t believe in the visual hierarchy, and while I used to use terms like “visually impaired“ as my primary identification when I was younger, those days were very much the days fraught with internalized ableism and painfully low self-esteem and a desperate desire to cling onto whatever vision I had left, thinking more was better no matter what. I didn’t know a lick of braille, I never left the house by myself and refused to go out at night, I used ridiculous magnification system after ridiculous magnification system to read at a crawling 30 words per minute, but I thought because I “didn’t need a cane“ that I was fine and wasn’t “really blind“ and would never be like those REAL blind people. They were pitiful and I wasn’t pitiful. And more often than not, it seems most other people who use those terms tend to also be using them with similar motivations to my younger self, and it is an incredibly common story.
This isn’t to say that people are not allowed to use the language they want, because people can have all sorts of reasons for choosing the words they do, and they may not be choosing them out of internalized ableism and may have completely different motives. And even if they are using those terms because of internalized ableism, that is a journey that they will need to take for themselves and they may not be ready for the word “blind“ and it is not a journey you can force the ending you think it should have on too. Everyone is at different places, and part of being a community is taking everyone where they are and allowing them to grow at their own pace.
But I, personally, am not fond of those terms, and will not typically use them on this blog and I’m not especially comfortable being referred to with them. I have residual vision, as many blind people do, but I am a very capable blind person who is no better than any other blind person with any less vision than me. I am not fond of using terms created by uneducated sighted “professionals,“ and I am not comfortable reinforcing the visual hierarchy, so I much prefer to remain universally with blindness in all areas of life.
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