Five reasons why you should employ a blind person and how it can benefit your company.
02 December 2025
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“I don’t understand why you, who are so talented and who has two degrees aren’t working in some high earning management role. Or why you’re not a famous writer or musician.”
I’ve heard several variants of this comment over the years. They maybe meant as compliments and I do the dutiful thing of smiling, laughing and blushing in the right places. But these kinds of comments make me feel ashamed more than anything else now that I’m unemployed and have been so since the start of the first lockdown in 2020. I have successfully held down jobs before for organisations including the BBC. And during the worst of the pandemic, when there were few prospects of getting any sort of job, I trained as a life coach and joined an orchestra and formed a band with two friends in order to rebuild my singing career. However, my handful of clients and gigs haven’t yet taken me out of the unemployed zone and I’m currently spending my days filling out applications, hoping I will get lucky one day and get something I love, or love just enough to help me build my own portfolio career.
Applying for jobs is hard for anyone and the many rejection e-mails before someone has enough faith to take a chance on you, can make the most cheerful one out there seriously depressed. But it’s no secret that for totally blind people like me, the job search is a million times more difficult. To illustrate this, a report on employment by the RNIB on visually impaired people states that while 76% of the general working aged population is in work, that number goes down to 51% among disabled people excluding those with sight loss and further down to 27% among people who are registered blind or partially sighted. The more severe your sight loss, the less likely you are to be employed.
Not only are we a bit more limited in the type of jobs we can take on, (I’d love to be an Uber driver until I find something else, but somehow I think nobody would feel safe riding with me,) but in applying for the jobs where sight really isn’t needed, there are often insecurities with employers around adding a visually impaired person to their workforce. These include ignorance to how blind people can actually perform any sort of job and that employing someone with a visual impairment would be expensive.
With modern technology, blind and partially sighted people can do a whole host of jobs and employing us doesn’t have to cost your company any more than employing anyone else.
If you are an employer wondering whether to hire a blind or visually impaired person, I will give you five reasons why you absolutely should not hesitate to do so and how it may even benefit your company.
- Blind people are creative problem solvers and innovative thinkers.
I cannot count how many times I’ve seen this particular term listed under the “desirable” skill section in a job advert. Being a blind person who wants to live in the mainstream world, I’ve often had to come up with creative solutions both during work and leisure time in order to participate in tasks and activities. A good example of this is when I wanted to learn how to kayak and suggested we tie a rope from the back of my instructor’s kayak to the front of mine. That way, she could steer me and I wouldn’t get lost. I on the other hand, felt as if I had complete control of my own kayak since I had to do all the paddling myself. And look at the BeMyEyes app which allows a blind person to call up a volunteer for help with any task at their convenience. It’s arguably one of the simplest and most innovative apps out there. It has opened up the world to me and my fellow blind people in a way I wouldn’t have thought possible before.
2. Blind people are conscientious. No matter how clever, talented or educated we are, as blind people who want to be successful we have to shout a bit louder and go that extra mile in order to reach success. Of course, as blind people we are as diverse as anybody and there might be that story of that amazing blind entrepreneur with the rich dad, who helped set up their business, or that one called stevie who was in the right place at the right time and landed that recording contract. But all the successful blind people I know, and there are quite a few, have worked their butts off to get to where they are and also to stay where they are.
3. Loyalty. In my current job hunt, I make a very special effort to find companies who are committed to diversity and appear to walk the walk as well as talk the talk. When I’m lucky enough to come across them and I get an interview, but not the job, I never wonder if my blindness was the reason I wasn’t successful. But with other companies who may not mention diversity and equal opportunities as more than the final part of the last sentence at the bottom of their website, I am always left wondering whether it was me or my eyes that failed the interview. I am not alone in having these kind of thoughts and I have had countless conversations with my blind peers as to how to find a company that will not only accept our visual impairment, but also go the extra mile to ensure our workplace is as accessible as it can be. So when we do find those employers, we stick with them. Especially if they support our development and we have the opportunity to work our way up to a more senior level if we aspire to do so.
4. Diversity is trendy. Trends come and go. If Tiktok went, I wouldn’t cry, but I sincerely hope diversity is here to stay. A diverse workforce strengthens a company in many ways, something I intend to discuss in a later article, and employers who are committed to diversity is committed to a world of equal opportunities for everyone. And if everyone gets to work, we will get a better economy.
5. We’re not expensive. Access to Work is a government scheme which aims to help disabled people by providing solutions they need to carry out that job. This include screen reading software, money for transport and support workers and work Pas, Braille displays and voice recorders to mention a few things. Employers would only therefore need to provide visually impaired employees with whatever they provide other employees. And any other reasonable adjustments doesn’t have to cost anything either. It could be simple things like flexible working, making sure the employee has an easy to locate desk if they are in the office or a telephone with bigger buttons. In the case of a blind employee needing a support worker, you’ll also get a kind of a two for one deal. And who wouldn’t want that?
I hope these five points have made you feel more confident that hiring a blind or partially sighted person can benefit you as an employer in a number of ways and that it isn’t any more expensive than employing someone else.
Source: LinkedIn
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