You might think that adapting a home around blindness or visual impairment is a bit niche. It’s true that 2 million people – which is the number living with sight loss in the UK, according to the RNIB – is a minority. But it is a very sizeable minority. And the sight loss experienced by those people is not insignificant: that statistic counts up everyone who meets the international definition of impaired vision, and this means being able to see halfway down the optician’s chart, and no further. It means being obliged to give up your driving license. 

Often it means making creative adaptations in the home. And here the people living with a visual impairment have a great deal to teach people who do not. The changes that visually impaired people often make to their homes are changes that could benefit most people. They can make any home safer, more liveable and more enjoyable. And if your house is on the market and you do not want to miss out on having one of the 2 million as a potential purchaser, they could make a property that bit more saleable.

Just like the creation myth, it starts with light. Make sure you have the option to bring in as much of the stuff as possible – and the option to keep it out, if glare is unhelpful. Fit adjustable blinds, or curtains that can pull right back so they don’t obscure too much of the window.

Use bulbs with a higher wattage. If you still think in terms of the old incandescent lightbulbs, a bright, 100W lightbulb is the equivalent of a 20W CFL bulb, or an 18W LED. Consider the bulb’s “temperature”, too. Some people with visual impairment are more or less affected by different light colouration, so it is worth trying out different kinds of temperature (noting that this is actually a colour, not a measurement of the bulb’s heat), to see whether any work better for you. They range from warm white (giving a traditional candlelit-yellow feel) to cool white (more bluey) and daylight (which can look extremely bluey, given that we’re all used to yellowish interiors).

Another light trick is to place lights so as to illuminate darker corners. Lights – and mirrors. Mirrors don’t exactly make a room brighter (that would be magic, and would mean that all we’d need to solve the energy crisis is a torch and a couple of mirrors facing each other). But they do spread light around a room more evenly. They also mean that less of the light gets absorbed by, say, a dark-coloured wall. Avoid dark-coloured walls. And, for some people, avoid higher-gloss bathroom paints, if they produce an unhelpful glare.

In a bathroom, consider a magnifying mirror, perhaps one with LED lights inside it. And make sure that heavily-trafficked areas (trafficked in visual terms) are especially well lit. That means kitchen worksurfaces, cookers, bathrooms, doorways and places where you do concentrated work – whether that’s reading, knitting or putting model ships in bottles. LED-strip lights, either battery-powered or (better, if you can afford the installation) mains-powered, are an inexpensive way to bring what’s called “task-light”. You can stick them to the undersides of overhead kitchen cupboards, or on the wall in darker bathroom areas.

Cupboard interiors can be transformed with a stick-on LED or two, and nowadays you can get LEDs that come on automatically when they sense the door has opened. Genius. A strategically placed torch can also be a practical intervention – making sure there’s always one to hand when you need to walk down the steps to the compost bin, say.

Adaptations of that sort are things everyone should consider, on the grounds of safety. How about installing an entry-phone/video doorbell? Securing electrical wires? Taping down rugs with special double-sided sticky tape (cheap and easy to find online)? Putting up handrails on the stairs? Avoiding shiny flooring, especially the kind that’s slipper when (invisibly) wet? Marking steps (and beams, for those in old houses) with brightly contrasting paint or tape? You can paint doorframes in a contrasting colour too.

And are you fed up with not remembering which oven knob controls which burner, and which way up or down is maximum or minimum? Stick on a bump dot or touch dot (or tactile sticker/label as they’re more formally known): the RNIB sell them in the UK and they’re easy to apply.

Some adaptations are brilliantly DIY. If your shampoo and conditioner bottles are easily confused, put a hairband round one of them. (Make sure it is the same one, every time!) Do you struggle to know which sheet is which? Mark them with a bit of colour-coded tape. (We should all do this, and do it today.) Medicines and food jars can be marked up with coloured labels, which can be printed up using a large font.

Other adaptations take advantage of clever product innovations. Cut-resistant gloves for slicing veg. Speaking scales/thermometers/measuring tapes/clocks/thermostats, and so on. Those video doorbells – which of course are audio doorbells too.

And talking of technology, don’t forget the TV. Flat-screen models usually come up with complicated visual settings, and are often set to auto-adjust so the screen matches the ambient lighting conditions. For some people, this is unhelpful. It’s not just a case of turning up the contrast and the brightness. As with all adaptations, it’s about finding what works best for you. What makes your home feel as if it works around your needs, and preferences, and not the other way round.

If you are considering extending or altering your home, you may find some of these services useful: