Loss of Obscurity

A concept introduced by Thomas J. Carroll in his 1961 book "Blindness: What It Is, What It Does, and How to Live with It," in which he identified twenty distinct losses that accompany the onset of blindness. Loss of obscurity refers to the unavoidable conspicuousness of carrying a white cane or being accompanied by a guide dog: a blind person in public space is marked out as blind and cannot blend into a crowd. The concept has become influential in accessibility research on assistive technology design, because tools that make a person more visibly disabled trade off against the privacy and independence that sighted people take for granted. Contemporary debates — for example, over whether a suitcase-shaped navigation robot should visibly identify its user as blind for safety in traffic — often return to this concept.