Coping with blindness

But as Ellen Bassani pointed out, what people need is educating and another gimmick wouldn't achieve that.

Many are born blind and have never had to adjust to it. They know their houses, streets and obstacles like the back of their hands, and have been on special training courses to learn how they and their guide dogs can best work together.

One day stumbling around Oxford would not home in on any of these skills, nor prove how able blind or partially-sighted people are.

Ellen, 50, is a shining example of this. I met her in Gloucester Green's market, one of the busiest places in Oxford, and shadowed her for the day.

Mums with pushchairs, people in wheelchairs, kids on bikes, motorcyclists and taxis, market traders unpacking their wares from lorries, teenagers running or stopping to stare, and all the noise and smells that you associate with a market, are overwhelming at the best of times. The usual tranquillity of Gloucester Green is enveloped in a wall of sound and movement, and would be somewhere to avoid if I was severely partially sighted.

But I'm not and, as Ellen pointed out, blindness is not the problem. It's other people's attitudes.

She has no trouble with the market, goes there every week and knows all the traders well. I met her at the corner of George Street and she clasped my hand firmly. She oozes vitality and determination.

Grasping the lead of her guide dog Scottie she waits until the buses and taxis nudge past, and Scottie indicates the road is safe to cross.

She then walks rapidly over to the market, edges around the stalls and walks straight up to her first port of call to order some groceries. The trader knows her well, tells her what new stock he has and fills her bag. She asks how much she owes him and then opens her purse while he takes out the right change.

"I have to rely on trust and no-one has ever let me down," she says as she marches on to the next stall.

I could hardly keep up with her as she toured the market, knowing instinctively where each stall was. She tells me, for example, that she knows where the pet food stall is because it's next to the olive stall which has a very distinctive smell.

Half an hour later, with her shopping bags bulging, she invites us back to her house for tea.

We walk past a myriad of shops all advertising the latest look, brand and colour. How does she choose her clothes, I ask as I stare in the windows.

"My daughter and my mother are both great about clothes and knows what suits me. I know what fabrics I like and can tell a lot about an item of clothing just by touching it.

"But my daughter has taken it upon herself to be the fashion police and if she doesn't like something she won't let me out of the door," she laughs.

I checked myself. I had assumed she didn't have children. Why? Because I wrongly assumed it would be too hard to manage.

She says: "I have two teenage children and their early years were the hardest, but since then it hasn't been a problem. They are both fiercely independent, individual characters." A divorcee, Ellen is now living happily with her partner David Thompson.

I drive her home and she folds easily into the front seat, with Scottie crouched by her legs.

"Some taxi drivers can't deal with the dog and just drive off when they see me," she says conversationally.

Having lived off the Abingdon Road for many years she knows her street very well and is aware of hazards, such as trees with low branches and bumps on the pavement.

She bustles into her house and makes us a cup of tea. She says she is not a gadget woman but has a talking microwave, watch and a speaking personal organiser that does everything from dialling the phone to planning her diary.

She needs a personal organiser because Ellen wears an astonishing variety of different hats, from public speaking to disability issues training.

She is a voice therapist, a councillor and she still manages to fit in time to take dancing lessons, go to the gym, and organise a busy social life.

But suddenly she is tired: "You have to concentrate so hard. You have to rely on smells and sounds and all your senses are very acute all the time, which is very intense, so you do tire quicker than everyone else," she explains.

And as I leave I hear her chatting to David and preparing supper, the same as anyone else in her street.

It took time to accept there was a problem ELLEN has not had an easy life. She was born in Australia, with severe visual problems, to parents who tried to deny she had a sight problem.

She was then sent to the local convent school and didn't tell any of the teachers she was blind. Neither did her parents.

She remembers: "I hid it very well. It took them nine months to notice and they let me stay on after that."

It wasn't until she was 13 that an eye specialist took her parents aside and said she needed to go to a special school to learn to cope with her sight problem. She learned Braille in six weeks, and managed to get a scholarship to university.

She admits that she didn't have much fun as a teenager. "It was mostly appalling and very lonely, but I survived," she says.

"You do go through a stage where there is a paralysing rage at the injustice of it all, where you are angry at being helpless and bereaved and the unfairness of it all. But then I was trying to adjust to the sighted world, not letting it adjust to me." She then moved on to Queensland University where she took a degree in social work and there she learned how better to relate to people.

She says: "To survive you need help but you need the other person to feel good about that. You need to establish a relationship even if it's only for five minutes. They need to get something too, so that's it's not a transaction made with guilt or in any way patronising. It's the same with the market traders - they feel helpful when they meet me."

Ellen then moved to England because this country was better equipped for those with partial sight. "You have footpaths, great radio and zebra crossings," she laughs.

But she admits she did not come to terms with her blindness until her mid-40s and until then was too ashamed to use a guide dog or a white stick.

By that time she was married and had two children. She and her husband eventually separated. She relishes life now, but acknowledges it has been a long journey.

Millions of blind people globally World Sight Day was launched in 1998 by Lions Club International to educate the world about the need and ability to conquer blindness. It also hopes to eliminate preventable and reversible forms of blindness caused by diseases such as cataract, glaucoma and trachoma

There are 40 million blind people worldwide

80 per cent of blindness is preventable or reversible

Glaucoma is the world's leading preventable cause of blindness approximately 67 million people have glaucoma worldwide

At least 50 per cent of all blindness is caused by cataracts, which account for 13-17 million people

85 per cent of all blindness worldwide is found in Africa and Asia.