Sight Isn’t the Same as Insight (Opinion Piece)

“The most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart.” (Helen Keller, 1891) 

The Realisation

I thank the world of science, cyberpsychology, and technology for elevating my knowledge, keeping me humble, and giving me the drive to make things better, and for meeting Ncebakazi, whom I have come to know and greatly respect. She was waiting for instructions to proceed, though I didn’t know it at the time. Seeing her hesitate, my first instinct was to call out, “Select the drop-down,” and in the half second before I said it, I understood how useless that comment was. Ncebakazi had no context, and none of the visual clues that I rely on every day to navigate around a screen. She is fully blind, and the game we built didn’t work with JAWS, the screen reader she uses to navigate everything else, so she was attempting our brand-new tutorial without the one tool that translates a screen into something she can use.   
 
Ncebakazi is impressively sharp, with a memory unlike any I have come across, able to remember strings of information and details that other testers would only manage collectively. Yet she couldn’t complete this simple step in our Online Escape Room Tutorial, selecting an option from a drop-down menu, and the problem wasn’t Ncebakazi. We designed the interaction assuming sight, then wrote instructions that assumed it as well.  

 For our team, it was an oversight, the kind the world inflicts on blind and partially sighted people every day. Grateful that we had recognised it and were in a position to buck the trend, we were determined to ensure that Ncebakazi and other visually impaired learners would have learning experiences just as memorable, meaningful and valuable as those of their sighted peers. 

The Facts Too Few Consider

The Vision Loss Expert Group’s analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study, published in The Lancet Global Health in 2021, estimated that in 2020 around 43 million people were blind and a further 295 million had moderate or severe distance vision impairment, out of a world population of 7.79 billion. That is roughly 1 in 180 people who are blind, and about 1 in 26 with a moderate-to-severe impairment.   

This isn’t a niche audience. Sight loss rises with age, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), and every organisation with an aging workforce is drifting towards this population, most with little to no planning in place.  

Evidence suggests very few organisations are prepared. In the UK, where data is strong, the employment rate is 83% for non-disabled people and 27% for blind and partially sighted people, according to the Office for National Statistics. This next part should make all employers feel uncomfortable.  

“Registered blind and partially sighted people with a degree have only the same chance of finding work as someone in the general population with no qualifications at all.” Holmes report, Dr Rachel Hewett (2022)

This gap in how workplaces are built could partly explain the higher rates of depression and anxiety in those who are blind or partially sighted, and especially the older adults experiencing social isolation. 

The Cost of Oversight

None of this happens because organisations plan to exclude anyone. It happens because sight is assumed by default at almost every stage of designing and building digital products.  

WebAIM is a non-profit organisation based at Utah State University that scans the home pages of the world’s top one million websites every year. In its 2026 report, 95.9% of those home pages had detectable failures against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). Design flaws such as low-contrast text appeared on 83.9% of pages, and more than half contained images without alternative text (Alt Text describes the image and is announced by screen readers in place of a picture).  
 
WCAG guides the design of any online page, tool, or application and consists of four principles known as POUR. Content must be Perceivable, so information can’t rely on just one sense, which is why images usually need alt text. It must also be Operable, so everything can be used without a mouse, through a keyboard or assistive technology. Content must also be Understandable, with predictable behaviour and clear instructions, and Robust so that assistive technologies such as JAWS can read and interpret it.  
 
A further table of success criteria grades WCAG success through three levels: Level A is the bare minimum, Level AA is what most legislation and procurement contracts insist on, and Level AAA is the highest tier but rarely referenced. Most organisations use cheap automated tools that allow products to pass compliance where they really shouldn’t. No scanner could have caught the mistake in our Online Escape Room; only a blind tester trying to navigate the game could have. 
 
To compound the problem, organisations plan around the data they are shown, and blind and partially sighted people are routinely missing from that data. Many organisations simply do not know how many of their staff are partially or fully blind, often because those staff fear that disclosing will cost them their job, limit their opportunities, or lead their employer to see the disability rather than the person (von Schrader et al., 2014). 
 
What isn’t measured doesn’t get a budget, but it is far worse than this.  
 
Castle (2024) provides further evidence of barriers to entry in work environments, regardless of country. In Norway, a study of more than 1,300 employers ranked blind candidates as the least employable of all, scoring them significantly lower than wheelchair users, people with hearing impairments, and every other disability group assessed. In the United States, 82.3% of 379 hiring managers could not explain how a visually impaired employee would perform any assigned work tasks; to put this in perspective, we are talking about sending an email or using the internet, not coding the back end of an app. 
 
Israel offers perhaps the most candid finding of the lot, with 46.8% of over 1,000 managers strongly agreeing that employers would rather hire someone without a disability than a person who is blind or visually impaired. Three countries, three research teams, one conclusion: the barrier to entry does not sit with employees, but with a lack of understanding, an unwillingness to accommodate, and the assumptions of those who take so much for granted. 
 
The instinctive fix is to encourage more people to disclose, and it is the wrong one Cholteeva (2022, December 1). Katharine Moxham of GRiD notes that “what gets reported gets done”, yet concedes that even diligent organisations undercount, because so many conditions are invisible, gradual sight loss among them. Matthews explains that chasing disclosure is “not inclusion”; removing barriers is, so that an employee who says nothing still gets the adjustments they need. Ncebakazi never had to explain her blindness to anyone, she needed a game that worked with JAWS. If organisations can build for that from the start, then disclosure becomes a choice rather than a requirement or admission. 

The Missed Insight

In cybersecurity, the assumption is that blind users are more vulnerable than their sighted counterparts. However, a 2011 paper by Blythe, Petrie, and Clark investigating why people fall for phishing included blind participants, expecting them to be more vulnerable. The results proved them wrong; blind participants were more thorough and better at spotting phishing emails, taking great care to read every line of every message. Phishing relies heavily on visual magic tricks, with the simulation of authenticity (similar logos), familiar branding, and layouts that look right at first sight, and a screen reader strips all of that away, leaving only the words, the sender, and where the link actually leads. The cues sighted users trust most are precisely the ones attackers fake best, which means the people we assume are most at risk may be the ones reading the email as it should be read. 

The Real Reward

Our team went back to the drawing board, determined to ensure that every learner, including those with visual impairments, could enjoy the same meaningful and engaging learning experience we had originally envisioned. We began working closely with Ncebakazi, listening to her feedback and understanding her needs, and introduced built-in accessibility customisations, refining the audio, narration and timing of instructions to make the experience more intuitive and inclusive.  
 
A week later, we invited her to test it again. 

 Ncebakazi emailed us at 2 am, expressing her absolute joy at being able to play and complete the game. She shared her wonder at Room 3, which contained an audio and a video puzzle about a deepfake.   
 
Ncebakazi’s email brought me to tears, less because we had done something remarkable than because we had finally done something ordinary. We built a game Ncebakazi could play on the same terms as everyone else. Her last line in the email is one I keep thinking of. No automated scan, compliance checklist, or report has made me feel as proud as that one line, “I think it is safe to say the game is accessible”, written by the very person best positioned to judge.  

From here on, our team has committed to making accessibility a non-negotiable in everything we build, whether a learner is blind or partially visually impaired, dyslexic, deaf, or hard of hearing. That commitment starts long before anything reaches the LMS (Learning Management System). It shapes the first planning conversation, runs through every storyboard and informs each design decision along the way, because accessibility bolted on at the end is a patch, and our learners deserve something built for them from the beginning.  

Ncebakazi doesn’t need our kindness. She needs us to build learning experiences that she, and millions of others, can access, enjoy and benefit from just as much as anyone else. That’s the real objective, and achieving it doesn’t necessarily require extraordinary effort, just a little thought, care and consideration. 
 
And perhaps this raises a bigger question about how we approach learning in the first place. Are we simply ticking boxes, measuring success by how many people complete their training? Or should success be measured by what learners actually understand, internalise and take away from the experience? 

We were fortunate to have a client who recognised that their visually impaired employees deserved more than simply being able to complete a course. They deserved the same opportunity to learn, engage and succeed as everyone else. 

Because training completed does not always equal learning achieved. 

Basil Polydorou – Head of Learning Solutions  | BsC Cyber Psychology Candidate

References

Blythe, M., Petrie, H., & Clark, J. A. (2011). F for fake: Four studies on how we fall for phish. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 3469–3478. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979459 

Bourne, R., Steinmetz, J. D., Flaxman, S., Briant, P. S., Taylor, H. R., Resnikoff, S., Casson, R. J., Abdoli, A., Abu-Gharbieh, E., Afshin, A., Ahmadieh, H., Akalu, Y., Alamneh, A. A., Alemayehu, W., Alfaar, A. S., Alipour, V., Anbesu, E. W., Androudi, S., Arabloo, J., … Vos, T. (2021). Trends in prevalence of blindness and distance and near vision impairment over 30 years: An analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study. The Lancet Global Health, 9(2), e130–e143. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2214-109X(20)30425-3 

Holmes, C. (2026). Report on the Employment Gap for Blind and Partially Sighted People in the UK, ‘Out of Sight—Out of Work’. Lord Holmes of Richmond MBE. https://lordchrisholmes.com/report-on-the-employment-gap-for-blind-and-partially-sighted-people-in-the-uk-out-of-sight-out-of-work/ 

IAPB. (2021, February 24). Eye Health is Essential to Achieving UN SDGs. The International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness. https://www.iapb.org/news/eye-health-is-essential-to-achieving-un-sdgs/ 

RNIB. (2020). Employment Facts and Stats 2020 Report—Technology Association of Visually Impaired People. RNIB. https://www.tavip.org.uk/directory/employment-facts-and-stats-2020-report/ 

WebAIM. (2026). The WebAIM Million—The 2026 report on the accessibility of the top 1,000,000 home pages. Utah State University. https://webaim.org/projects/million/ 

WHO. (2026, February 10). Vision impairment and blindness. World Health Organization. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/blindness-and-visual-impairment