Campaigner Adele Waterfall-Brown works tirelessly with the Royal National Institute of Blind People to improve the day-to-day lives of visuallyimpaired people by raising awareness of the problems they regularly face. Here, she tells Jo Morris some of the ways in which their lives could be made easier

THE stereotype of the blind person needing help to cross the road is as persistent as it can be problematic. “Don’t just grab someone,” Adele says.

“It happens more than you’d think – someone might see you close to a road, think you want to cross and grab your arm to try and pull you across.

“They think they’re helping but it’s happened to me and I was petrified. You might not want to cross the road at all and having a stranger try to pull you across it is terrifying.

“It’s important to respect personal space, just like you would with anyone else.

“A better way would be to come up to me and ask me if I’d like help.”

Adele feels it important to combat such misunderstandings in a bid to break down the social barriers that can often stand in the way of the visually impaired.

She says: “People generally want to be helpful but some are often scared to make contact and some don’t know how to approach you and can go about things in the wrong way.

“Being visually impaired is hard for people to understand and it’s probably even harder for someone like me to understand being able to see perfectly and it does create social barriers.”

Being more verbal when around the visually impaired would be a great help, according to Adele.

“There are a lot of social misunderstandings that come from being visually impaired but there are little things that can be done to make things better,” she says.

“Sometimes you don’t know when someone’s talking to you and might end up seeming rude by interrupting or looking away.

“It would be very helpful if people said my name before coming up to me and then I know that they know me and they’re talking to me.

“They need to be more verbal as the visually impaired can’t see someone’s facial expression or someone approaching them.”

In a professional or customer service setting, Adele says, be polite, be discreet, provide large, clear menus or papers where possible and always point out the toilets.

Teachers should be aware of the difficulties facing their young charges as they progress through school – whether it’s addressing potential bullying or providing bigger balls to allow children with sightloss to take part in sports.

Adele supports a mentoring scheme set up by the RNIB to support visually impaired children.

She said: “The scheme has been launched for young people in mainstream education because it comes with so many challenges.

“School was quite difficult for me and I’d fall out with people because they’d do things like wave from a distance and think I was ignoring them when really, I just couldn’t see them.

“I’ve heard of a young boy whose teacher said he was lying about his sight because it changed each day, but sight loss can be very changeable. People think you are either blind or seeing but there are so many degrees in between.”

There are many ways in which day-today life could be made easier for the visually impaired, from the practical – making menus easier to read, making town centres more accessible and installing more safe places to cross roads – to the emotional – working to promote awareness, battle isolation and enable independence and empowerment.

“Mental health problems can result from failing to deal with things like this and it doesn’t need to be this way” says Adele.

“Sightloss has been challenging for me and I think it’s the same if you get any impairment that people don’t understand, whether mental or physical.

“People need to ask more questions and stop presuming – just ask, don’t let one experience colour your views and assume all people are the same.

“I want things to improve, I think of children in school now and I want them to grow up to a better world.”