Open House Tours

Last weekend was the Open House London weekend, where hundreds of buildings across the capital opened their doors for free for the public to look around and take part in talks and tours. These include many places that you might never have heard of or never considered visiting before. Some of the places also do tours during the rest of the year, but you may have to pay for them, whereas on this weekend they’re free. And some places may rarely grant public access at all, so this may be the only opportunity you get to look around. So it’s a great initiative that’s been running for 25 years now, and the volunteers who help to make it happen deserve thanks and praise for their work.

As part of this event, the team at VocalEyes arranged special audio described tours of 4 different buildings for visually impaired people. I went on 3 of them (I didn’t do the 4th as I had something else planned). It was my first time going to an Open House weekend, and I thoroughly enjoyed it. So I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for it next year. So here’s my summary of the tours I went on.

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Scam Emails – Natwest & Metro Bank

In this post I want to look at another couple of dodgy emails I’ve received recently, as I feel it’s important just to keep reminding people about them. Click here to see all of my scam email posts so far. I’ve also posted a video about them now as well, looking at these two emails and the previous ones I’ve mentioned here in the blog. So check that out as well in case it’s helpful.

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August 2017 Favourites

Hi there, welcome to my next update! My birthday month has been marked by a number of special outings, including my first meeting with one of my favourite Youtubers, my first audio description experiences at a theatre and a cinema, my first visits to a few places outside London, a park outing with a visually impaired social group, a music pub quiz, some talking statues, and a couple of other walks too. So yet again there’s a lot to cover here, with lots of photos and video footage accompanying it, and I hope you enjoy!

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Meeting Fashioneyesta

This Monday I finally got to meet one of my favourite Youtubers – Emily Davison from Fashioneyesta. We spent a delightful day together at Knole Park in Sevenoaks, and she’s posted a wonderful vlog about it on her second channel. So I wanted to blog about it from my own perspective as well, which I hope you enjoy!

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Hysteria (Def Leppard) – Box Set Review

For my birthday this month, my mother has paid for a couple of recently released music boxsets I wanted to get, and this is a review of the first one I’ve received – a boxset celebrating the 30th anniversary of Def Leppard’s Hysteria album.

I also did an unboxing video so you can see everything that’s in the set. I did have a go at doing a first listen review video for disc 1 as well, but even just for one disc the editing required would have taken too long. It’s far easier to write a review really. So I hope you enjoy my review in this post!

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Small Youtuber Tag

For this post and video, I’m doing the small Youtuber tag, which I decided to do after seeing Annie Elainey’s video. I don’t know if she originally created the tag but that’s where I found it. Her Youtube channel is well worth checking out as well, she’s a brilliant disability campaigner and blogger.

Anyway, on with my answers to the tag, I hope you enjoy!

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My Favourite Computer Games

One of the programmes I’ve been enjoying on TV recently is Dara Ó Briain’s Go 8 Bit, a comedy game show where celebrities compete against each other on a variety of video games, both old and new. It’s great fun, and it’s got me thinking about some of the games I used to play when I was younger. So I figured it would be a good excuse to wallow in the nostalgia by writing a post about them.

These days I spend more than enough time on computers as it is – as part of my job all day, and then doing other things in my spare time like going on social media, blogging, watching videos, etc – plus I go out and about a lot too. So I’m not big into gaming as well, as I just don’t have the time, money or inclination for it. And the friends I have aren’t big gamers either.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t play modern games though. I would gladly give them a go if I had the opportunity, and I’d love to try Virtual Reality out of curiosity, as it would be interesting to see how accessible and immersive such experiences are these days, especially for someone with sight loss like myself. After all, it doesn’t matter how amazing the visuals or audio or storyline are, it can still be an awful game if the menus are tricky to navigate, text instructions and subtitles are hard to read, the controls are a nightmare, or it’s impossible to see what you’re supposed to be doing.

But thankfully there were many games that I was able to enjoy when I was younger, despite not having perfect vision, ranging from very basic PC programs to heavily detailed console titles. So I hope you enjoy reading about them here, and feel free to comment with your own favourites!

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July 2017 Favourites

Hello again, hope you’re doing well! This has been another busy and very enjoyable month, most significantly including my first experiences of audio described museum tours, along with more social events, festivals and some other nice walks. So I hope you enjoy this latest roundup!

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Room 101 – My Visually Impaired Frustrations

For this post, I thought I’d do something a bit like the TV show Room 101 (where celebrities nominate their pet hates to be locked away forever). It’s named after the torture chamber in George Orwell’s novel 1984, which is said to contain “the worst thing in the world”. We also had a Room 101 at my college which was rather memorable, because it was the examinations office! So that felt both appropriate and ominous!

So I wanted to do a post along those lines, using it as an excuse to list some things that frustrate or irritate me because I have a visual impairment. I’ve also made a Youtube video to accompany it. It’s not at all intended to be offensive or to upset anyone, and I’m not a negative or moaning person. I’m actually very positive, as I’ve hopefully conveyed throughout this blog. But it’s nice to get some things off your chest now and again, and to try and spread a bit of awareness in the process.

So here are 10 things that frustrate me as a visually impaired person, which either affect me directly or have an impact on my friends and family. I could think of more, but this is plenty. If you’ve done any of these things, please don’t feel bad about them. We all make mistakes without meaning to, that’s life and that’s fine. All I ask is that you take it on board for future reference.

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June 2017 Favourites

Hi there, welcome back to the next instalment of my monthly updates. It’s hard to believe that it was the 6-month anniversary of my move to London in June, that’s certainly flown by!

Of course, I appreciate that this month is one that some people would rather forget, given the despicable attack on London Bridge and the devastating Grenfell Tower fire, and my thoughts go out to everyone affected by those terrible events.

But for me, I’ve happily continued with my explorations of London, taking advantage of the glorious weather to walk around a lot of different places, capturing lots of photos and videos along the way, as well as celebrating Aniridia Day, seeing TV shows being recorded and socialising with friends! Hence this is a very busy post, and I hope you enjoy it all!

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