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  1. Why are people blind?
  The leading cause of blindness globally is cataract. Other major causes include uncorrected near-sightedness, far-sightedness and astigmatism, glaucoma and age-related macular degeneration.* Few people are actually born blind.
• 2. How many blind people are there?
  There are 314 million visually-impaired people around the world; 45 million are blind.* In Hong Kong, the government reports that people with seeing difficulties constitute 1.8% of the population (122,600), of whom 11,400 are totally blind.**
• 3. What do blind people ‘see’?
  Some visually-impaired people can tell between brightness and darkness. Others can’t, and amongst them, those who become blind in later years of life can tell different shades of grey. Darkness is not necessarily seeing everything black; some people see everything white. People who are born blind cannot perceive darkness or brightness at all because they cannot conceive the act of ‘seeing’.***
• 4. Who are blind?
  82% of the world’s blind population are aged 50 and above. Females have higher risk in becoming visually-impaired than male in all regions of the world and at all age.*
• 5. What is Braille?
  Braille is a version of the alphabets designed for blind reading. Each character of Braille is made up of six dots in two columns and three rows. Each letter has a distinct combination of raised and un-raised dots. Braille was developed by Louise Braille in 1821 (do not ask whom Braille is named after). Today, Chinese speakers read and write Braille in form of pinyin, which is alternatively known as Xianxing Mangwen (現行盲文)。
• 6. Banknotes have no Braille. How can blind people tell them apart?
  By comparing sizes. Hong Kong banknotes, for that purpose, are user-friendly, because the size increases with the cash amount of each note. RMB are more difficult to tell apart, because there are too many versions of them and their sizes are inconsistent. US Dollar notes are all in the same size which makes it seem impossible for blind people to sort them. However, blind people in the States can still manage well by putting them into different parts of the purse or folding them in different ways.
• 7. What’s up with the white cane? There are many in the exhibition.
  The white cane is an international symbol for the blind. It assists with navigation for the blind and serves as a signal to surrounding people that its carrier is blind. Blind people have been using canes for centuries, but the canes universally painted white only after the First World War, when street traffic became busier and canes had to be made easily visible for drivers and pedestrians. 15 October is the annual White Cane Day, when campaigns are launched to raise awareness about the needs of the blind.
• 8. How do visually-impaired people use the computer?
  Depends. If you have some functional vision, you would use a screen magnifier. It is software, which enlarges screen contents. One of them is developed by Microsoft and is bundled with all current versions of Windows. With Mac OS, you can try press CONTROL and scroll mouse wheel to zoom in and out. If a user has no functional vision, a screen reader would come in handy. It is a software that interprets screen contents and transforms them into speech or Braille.
• 9. What about reading texts on mobile phones?
  Software is available for reading SMS on mobile phones as well as texts from instant messengers. Like sighted people, blind people nowadays prefer SMS over voicemails, so if you want to leave a message to a blind friend, send a text!
• 10. Where is the food?
  While dining, blind people have different ways to tell where food is. With food that is served on a plate, blind people would ask for the positions of foods according to a clock-dial. When alone, a blind person would remember the positions of foods by detecting their texture with cutleries. With a meal that is served in separate dishes at once on the table, blind people would ask another person to tap on each plate and say what the dish is, so that they can remember the position of each dish accordingly.

*Source: WHO, 2009.
**Source: Census and Statistics Department, HKSAR Government, 2008. Special Topics Report No. 48 – Persons with Disabilities and Chronic Diseases.
***Source: Dialogmuseum, Frankfurt.