Her high heels click in time with the long white cane, which skims in a low arc looking for trouble.



Follow its slim stem up past Elaine Waters' black nail polish, past the forearm tattoo of the last design she sketched in hospital. Then up to those bright, mascara-accented eyes.



"You don't look blind," people tell the Auckland mother of two, who lost her sight seven years ago as a side-effect of an autoimmune disease.



"You don't look stupid, but you are," she wants to retort, in her rich Scots lilt. "My question to the world is: 'What is a blind person supposed to look like?'"



Waters was a healthy, happy mother working as a makeup artist for Lancome when her world view was literally shattered. A panic attack in a Wellington cafe heralded the beginning of the nightmare. Then her eyes began to bulge out of her head. First the left and then the right.



She was diagnosed with Graves' Disease, which causes an overactive thyroid. Surgeons chipped away her eye sockets to relieve the pressure, but the damage was already done. The swelling had crushed the optic nerve and damaged her eye muscles. Suddenly her view was a constant kaleidoscope, a cubist distortion, all angles and sharp shards.



"It was pretty much being sighted to being legally blind in two or three weeks," Waters, 43, recalls.



She knew where everything was at home, but the smallest of tasks, such as cooking, became an exhausting ordeal.



"It was so difficult. I knew how to do it. I knew what a pot looked like, but there was a million pots and I would go to grab the handle but the handle wasn't there.



"Losing your independence was more devastating than not being able to see. There were a lot of dark times, a lot of frustration, a lot of times I didn't feel that anybody understood what I was going through. But just the pure love of my children made me want to achieve and do better the next day."



It took about four years for Waters to accept that this was as good as it would get. Now she marvels at how far she's come.

Inside, her fingertips skim the walls like antennae feeling out safe passage, her mind charting a mental map. Outside, the cane is her eyes. When she was first presented with it, she burst into tears. Now it stands for freedom.



She knows the way to the supermarket or pharmacy in little Te Atatu, but getting there can feel a mammoth task.



She counts the 150 steps to her sister's place, the cane tapping from side to side feeling for obstacles, gradient and texture. Hitting the bollard is the only way to know which of the array of versions she sees is real.



Her nose, too, works harder: the bakery's delicious yeasty smell gives it away, the pharmacy smells of perfumes, the air outside the takeaway bar is thick with the scent of fat frying.



Even now, crossing the road remains horrific. A flat-topped speed bump extends seamlessly from the footpath. She stops just before the edge, sensing through the cane the change from smooth pavement to the speed bump's rough chip. A car slows and she counts the 18 steps to the other side.



Once at the supermarket, she navigates her mental store map: third aisle down, second shelf up, in the middle. Sometimes, the map fails her. There's sago in the cupboard that no-one knows what to do with. And then there was the time she ordered 20 tins of baked beans online, instead of two.



"My son thinks it's quite funny when I come home with all these random things to try and make a meal with," Waters laughs.



But mostly, she has learnt independence. Her lhasa apso Skye is her unofficial guide dog. She works for her sister's company Modica as a researcher and executive assistant. She can work from home, but also loves going into the city office, putting on her makeup and the high heels her mobility coach told her never to wear.



She's even going to the gym, where she can power-walk on the treadmill, closing her eyes and pretending she's at the beach.



"I'm not going to fall over. I'm not going to trip up. I'm not going to bang into somebody. I can just walk for miles and it's been so lovely."



People often ask if it would have been easier if she'd been born blind. Perhaps, but she wouldn't trade the precious memories of son Jimmie, now 22, and daughter KDee, now 19. Jimmie and his partner live with Waters and do most of the cooking.

Those visual memories also help her decode the world she's now confronted with.



"I'm kind of putting bits of a puzzle together: a memory, what I'm actually seeing and what I think it should look like. I'm putting all those three things together to create an image of what's going on."



There are still bad days – when she gets short-changed or taxi drivers take 30 minutes for a five-minute trip. "I'm blind, not stupid."



But she feels she has finally come full circle, rediscovering her sunny, social self.



"I miss what I had before, but to be honest my life now is beautiful and I've never been at peace with myself as much as I am now. When you lose one of your senses, what I have found is your other senses are heightened.



"But it's really my intuition, my gut feeling. When I meet people I can kind of gauge, 'Yes, I want to give this person some time,' or 'No, maybe not'. So even though I can't see, I can actually see a lot more about the world that I live in. It might be a lot smaller, but the things I can see and take time to look at are beautiful things."



LAWRENCE SMITH/ FAIRFAX NZ Having gone blind in later life, Elaine Waters has had to learn to see differently.

BLIND FROM BIRTH: FINDING LIGHT IN THE DARK

When taxi drivers ask what colour his house is, Jonathan Mosen is often foxed. Even now, inside its walls, he leans in to his wife: "Is it green?"

There's nothing wrong with his memory. It's just that colour is meaningless to a man who, from birth, has been unable even to distinguish dark from light.

ROSS GIBLIN/Dominion Post Blind couple Jonathan and Bonnie Mosen have never seen each other's faces but that's no barrier to love.

Mosen can't tell you what his world looks like because the very concept of seeing is alien to him. Say granny smith – his favourite apple – and green would never enter his mind. He thinks instead of its sharp tang, the smoothness of the skin, the bulbous shape leading into a skinny stem and that damn sticker he has to find before taking a bite. If he could suddenly see that same apple, he doubts he would know what it was.

Despite the common notion that blindness means seeing black, most blind people actually have partial or distorted vision. Mosen, who was born with congenital condition Norrie Disease, is one of the few who see nothing at all. It's like the television screen when it's off, he explains.

"It's not even that it's black, it's just switched off. Nothing's happening."

While most people cannot imagine navigating life without light, Mosen has had 46 years to learn how. And he started early.

When his older brother was born blind his parents thought it was a one-off. They moved from rural Taranaki to Auckland to be closer to Homai school for the blind. By the time Mosen came along 15 years later they were well experienced at dealing with a blind child, so he was lucky not to be molly-coddled.

"As a really young kid I had this ride-on horse with wheels. I rode it to death – literally: its head broke off. Down the side of the house there was a nice steep incline so you could get some speed going and you had to take a right hand turn at just the right time. If you turned too soon you'd smash your head into the side of the house and if you didn't turn quickly enough you got catapulted into the rosebush.

"To my parents' great credit, they let me figure this out. It was great because I learned about things like echolocation."





Blind couple Jonathan Mosen and wife Bonnie have learnt to be more aware of what their other senses pick up. Photo: ROSS GIBLIN/ FAIRFAX NZ

People often ask if a blind person's other senses are supercharged, or improve to compensate. That's certainly not true in Mosen's case: Norrie Disease also causes progressive hearing loss.

"I think we just learn to be more aware of what we have," Mosen says. "We probably process information more mindfully."

Take Mosen's blind wife, Bonnie. When she and her dog, Lizzie, take the bus to nearby Johnsonville mall, both know to get up when they cross a speed bump. Most passengers probably wouldn't know it was even there.

While touch is also critical to a blind person's understanding of the world, Mosen wants to be absolutely clear: no, he and Bonnie don't go around prodding mouths and pinching noses to determine what people look like.

"It's not like the movies. It is one of those terrible, gross misconceptions. Any blind person who goes around feeling people's faces should be done for harassment."

Echolocation is another example of learning to better use what you have. Sound bouncing off a hard concrete wall behaves differently to sound disappearing into space. So just as bats and dolphins send out sound waves and read the echos to map what is in their path, so blind people can click their tongue or fingers and let the echo be their guide, Mosen says.

"Without having to touch a wall or follow it along with your cane, you can hear the acoustical difference."

Research has even shown that the brains of blind people change to enable this, with echolocation lighting up the brain area usually used to process visual images.

Of course these days you can get an iPhone app that plots your route by GPS and calls out street signs and landmarks as you pass them.

Technology has revolutionised life for Mosen. He's also made it his business.

Having gained an arts degree and a masters in public policy, he has worked as a radio broadcaster, a lobbyist and as vice-president for leading international blind technology company Freedom Scientific. He's even stood for Parliament. These days he's a self-employed consultant who writes books about technology and helps developers adapt their apps for blind people.

Despite technological advances, about 70 per cent of working-aged blind people are unemployed. "Blind people are often limited not by our own abilities, but by other people's misconceptions of them," Mosen says.

He learnt to touch-type and read braille from an early age. His computer talks, but braille remains the only way a blind person can write things down and subsequently read them back. Take the weekly internet radio show Mosen runs as a hobby. When listeners email or tweet feedback, the pins on his braille reader pop up to convert computer text into tactile language that Mosen can then read out on air.

One ongoing challenge is making beautifully formated documents. Although appearances don't matter to Mosen – and that's one of the beauties of blindness for him – it's a sighted world and both he and his work have to be presentable "to get past all the other prejudices we can't do anything about".

Mosen is elegantly turned out in suit and perfectly knotted tie. Traditionally, he would ask ask a trusted person what clothes go with what and add braille labels. Now, there are apps that describe photos and even one, Be My Eyes, manned by volunteers who will tell you what colour your shirt is or which can is baked beans and which is dog food.

The Mosens also watch television – for that, there's audio description. Try watching the last few minutes of Fatal Attraction with the screen turned off and you'll understand its value, Mosen jokes.

"There's no dialogue at all. You can be a blind person sitting through Fatal Attraction and you can have no idea how the damn movie ends!"

Mosen calls blindness a characteristic. Sometimes it's an advantage – being able to read in the dark as a kid. Sometimes it's a pain in the butt, but no more so than, say, being short. He's raised four sighted children with his sighted ex-wife, taken them to Disneyland, read to them, played Monopoly and Beatles Rock Band on Wii. He's sky-dived and bungy-jumped like any other thrill-seeker. In fact, his earliest recollection is of climbing into a baby bath and launching off the steep attic stairs.

"My first memory is of the bump, bump, bumpety bump. This extraordinary sense of acceleration, hurtling down this flight of steep stairs and the family just coming running, wondering what the hell this noise was about. Then they saw this bundle of baby at the bottom of the stairs just giggling away and they were mortified that I might have been seriously injured. I think that's the way I've lived life."

Legally blind dad Paul Gibson had to struggle to get support to bring up his daughters Alix, 11, and Kara, 9. But it's the best thing he has ever done. Photo: CAMERON BURNELL/ FAIRFAX NZ

BLIND PARENTING

Paul Gibson looks right through me. His job is to prevent people with disabilities suffering that same unnerving sensation.

The 53-year-old has about 3 per cent residual sight, on the outskirts of vision. He knows I'm there but doesn't see me because I'm right in front of him.

Three squares out of 100 doesn't sound like much, but he moves easily from kitchen to dining room, placing bowls of curry on the table for his two girls.

Eleven-year-old Alix and 9-year-old Kara are his proudest achievements, and the ones he has fought hardest for.

Gibson's wife also has a serious disability and the pair realised they would need a fulltime nanny, which at the time they could not afford. Needs assessors offered gardening support but said children were a "lifestyle choice". Gibson now fights that mentality, as a disability rights commissioner at the Human Rights Commission.

Gibson calls himself an environmentally generated mutation. When his mother was pregnant, his parents moved into a poorly finished house. The drinking water came from a lead-painted roof. The family sickened and experts believe the lead poisoning damaged Gibson's genes.

However, his poor sight wasn't diagnosed until he was almost 5, when someone noticed he could read felt pen but not pencil.

Growing up in rural Kaponga, Taranaki, Gibson drove tractors on the road at 12 and got his licence at 15. He didn't wear glasses, so no-one thought to check his eyesight. He taught his sister to drive by following the white line – the only thing he could see.

He got by and still does. A family has been an unparalleled blessing. There were the scary times – dosing the sick child at night when no-one could read the medicine label; the delay before noticing that newborn Kara was black from oxygen deprivation; the time Alix exclaimed she was combing her hair with a knife (it turned out to be plastic); the grilling from social workers when Alix broke both arms before the age of 2.

And for the girls it's a different life from that of the average tween. Alix sometimes speaks for her father, as parents do for their children. There's a maturity that speaks of early responsibility. They are their parents' eyes.

Alix narrates Kara's dance recitals. Kara cringes at the memory of Dad congratulating her for a netball goal she didn't score, or at still having to hold her parents' hands, as she acts as their guide.

And then there was the time snow blanketed the capital and Gibson made a snowman: "I scraped up a lot of dog poo as well."

But it's not all struggles, Alix is quick to point out: "People believe that just because they have a disability they can't give us support, but they can."

When the "Dads can read" programme came around at school, Gibson got Eric Carle's Papa, Please Get the Moon For Me brailled so he could join in. The family also travels regularly overseas. And Kara is so proud of what Dad does that she wants to be a disability rights lawyer.

For Gibson, blindness has opened more doors than it has closed. There have been struggles to find work, but technology is a godsend. His JAWS (Jobs Access With Speech) talking software sounds like Stephen Hawking on Chipmunk speed, but he insists it's like going to Glasgow – it takes a while before you realise they're speaking the same language.

"To me [I imagine] the experience of being fully sighted is a bit like going to Disneyland. I was curious to find out was it was like and I had a great time when I was there, but also I wanted to return to New Zealand. This is where I live, this is who I am, this is how I can contribute. So while I'm curious about what it's like to be fully sighted and I'd be interested in spending a day that way, I wouldn't like to change how I am."

BLINDNESS IN NEW ZEALAND

168,000 Kiwis have some degree of vision loss.

11,774 are blind or have very low vision (based on membership of the Blind Foundation, which celebrates its 125th anniversary this year)

Most blind people have limited vision, rather than seeing black

Common eye conditions include:

CATARACT

Cataracts are cloudy areas on the lens. They can usually be corrected with surgery.

GLAUCOMA

Glaucoma affects 1 in 50 New Zealanders over the age of 40. When fluid drainage from the eye is blocked, pressure within the eye becomes abnormally high, causing damage to the optic nerve and tunnel vision. It can be detected and treated with regular eye tests.

MACULAR DEGENERATION

The macula is the small spot near the middle of the retina. Macular degeneration reduces central vision and can be caused by aging or inherited conditions.

DIABETIC RETINOPATHY

Diabetes can cause damage to the blood vessels feeding the retina at the back of the eye. Clots and scars can form on the retina, blocking light to light-sensitive cells and distorting vision.