Famous blind people include Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles and Andrea Bocelli in music, Helen Keller and Louis Braille in education, Erik Weihenmayer in mountaineering and David Blunkett in government. This list covers 36 well known and notable blind people, from blind celebrities to pioneers, across music, writing, acting, science, sport, public life and India, with how and when each person lost their sight and what they went on to do.
Blindness covers a wide range. Some of these famous visually impaired people were born blind, some lost their sight in childhood and some lost it as adults. Marla Runyan is legally blind and has some sight, and Helen Keller and Haben Girma are deafblind. Each entry says which applies.
Famous Blind People in Music
Stevie Wonder, singer and songwriter
Stevie Wonder became blind shortly after birth, when oxygen in his incubator and his premature birth caused retinopathy of prematurity. He has won 25 Grammy Awards, an Academy Award for “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2014.
Ray Charles, singer
Ray Charles began losing his sight at age four or five and was blind by seven, most likely from glaucoma. He won 17 Grammy Awards and was in the first group inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1986. His version of “Georgia on My Mind” became Georgia’s state song in 1979.
Andrea Bocelli, tenor
Andrea Bocelli was born with congenital glaucoma and lost his remaining sight at age 12 after a football struck his eye. He won the newcomers section of the Sanremo Music Festival in 1994, and his duet “Time to Say Goodbye” with Sarah Brightman topped the German charts for 14 weeks.
José Feliciano, singer and songwriter
José Feliciano was born blind in Lares, Puerto Rico, because of congenital glaucoma. His 1968 cover of “Light My Fire” reached number 3 on the US pop chart, and he won two Grammys that year, including Best New Artist. He also wrote “Feliz Navidad”.
Ronnie Milsap, country singer
Ronnie Milsap was born with a congenital condition that left him almost completely blind. He has won six Grammy Awards, had 35 number one hits on Billboard’s country chart and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 2014.
Jeff Healey, guitarist
Jeff Healey lost his eyes to retinoblastoma, a rare eye cancer, when he was almost one year old. He played guitar flat on his lap, and his band’s single “Angel Eyes” reached number 5 on the US Billboard Hot 100. He also appeared in the 1989 film Road House.
Doc Watson, musician
Doc Watson lost his sight to an eye infection before his second birthday. He won seven Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004 and the National Medal of Arts in 1997.
Famous Blind Pianists and Jazz Singers
Art Tatum, jazz pianist
Art Tatum was blind in one eye from birth and had partial sight in the other. Born in Toledo, Ohio, in 1909, he was mostly self-taught and became one of the most celebrated jazz piano soloists before his death in 1956.
Nobuyuki Tsujii, classical pianist
Nobuyuki Tsujii was born blind in Tokyo in 1988 with microphthalmia, a condition in which the eyes are abnormally small. In 2009 he tied for the gold medal at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, and he made his Carnegie Hall debut in 2011.
Diane Schuur, jazz singer and pianist
Diane Schuur was born two months premature in 1953, and retinopathy of prematurity left her totally blind. She taught herself piano by ear and won Grammy Awards for Best Female Jazz Vocal Performance in 1986 and 1987.
Famous Blind Writers, Artists and Actors
John Milton, poet
John Milton was totally blind by 1652, when he was about 43. He dictated his epic poem Paradise Lost to assistants, and it was published in 1667.
Fanny Crosby, hymn writer
Fanny Crosby lost her sight as a baby, after an eye inflammation at six weeks old. She wrote more than 8,000 hymns and gospel songs, including “Blessed Assurance” and “To God Be the Glory”.
Jorge Luis Borges, author
Jorge Luis Borges began losing his sight in his early thirties and was completely blind by the late 1950s. He directed the Argentine National Library from 1955 to 1973 and wrote story collections including Ficciones and El Aleph.
Helen Keller, author and activist
Helen Keller lost her sight and hearing at 19 months old after an illness. In 1904 she graduated cum laude from Radcliffe, the first deafblind person to earn a college degree, and she wrote The Story of My Life in 1903.
Eşref Armağan, painter
Eşref Armağan was born in Istanbul in 1953 with eyes that did not develop fully. He paints in oils, outlines his work with a braille stylus and applies paint with his fingers, and his paintings use visual perspective. For more creative ideas, see our list of hobbies for blind people.
Bruce Horak, actor and painter
Bruce Horak lost his right eye and more than 90 percent of the vision in his left to retinoblastoma, diagnosed at 18 months old. He plays Hemmer on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and is the first legally blind actor to portray a character in the Star Trek franchise.
Famous Blind Educators and Pioneers of Access
Louis Braille, inventor of braille
Louis Braille was three when a tool slipped and struck his right eye in his father’s harness shop, and sympathetic ophthalmia left him totally blind. At 15 he adapted a dot-based writing system into braille, and he published his method in 1829.
Our guide on how blind people read and write every day shows how braille is used now.
Haben Girma, disability rights lawyer
Haben Girma is deafblind. In 2013 she became the first deafblind student to graduate from Harvard Law School, and the Obama administration named her a Champion of Change that year.
Sabriye Tenberken, co-founder of Braille Without Borders
Sabriye Tenberken lost her sight to retinitis pigmentosa and was totally blind by age 12. By 1992 she had adapted German braille to the Tibetan script, now the official reading and writing system for blind people in Tibet, and she co-founded Braille Without Borders.
Daniel Kish, echolocation teacher
Daniel Kish lost both eyes to retinoblastoma before he was 13 months old. He founded World Access for the Blind in 2000, and he and his organization have taught a form of echolocation to at least 500 blind children.
For the tools most blind people use to get around, see our guide to primary traveling aids.
Famous Blind Scientists
Geerat Vermeij, evolutionary biologist
Geerat Vermeij has been blind since age three. He earned a PhD at Yale in 1971, studies fossil and living marine molluscs at the University of California, Davis, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2022.
Wanda Díaz-Merced, astronomer
Wanda Díaz-Merced lost her sight in her early twenties to complications of diabetic retinopathy. She is known for sonification, which turns astronomical data into sound so that patterns can be heard.
Kent Cullers, physicist
Kent Cullers was blind from birth after the oxygen in his incubator damaged his retinas. He earned a PhD in physics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1980 and managed Project Phoenix at the SETI Institute.
Abraham Nemeth, mathematician
Abraham Nemeth was born blind in New York City in 1918. He created the Nemeth Braille Code for mathematics and science, published in 1952, and later taught mathematics at the University of Detroit Mercy.
Famous Blind Athletes and Adventurers
Erik Weihenmayer, mountaineer
Erik Weihenmayer began losing his sight to juvenile retinoschisis at age nine and was completely blind by 14. On 25 May 2001 he became the first blind person to reach the summit of Mount Everest. Our guide to sports for blind people covers more ways to take part.
Trischa Zorn, Paralympic swimmer
Trischa Zorn has been visually impaired from birth. She swam in seven Paralympic Games between 1980 and 2004 and won 55 medals, 41 of them gold.
Marla Runyan, runner
Marla Runyan has had Stargardt disease since age nine and is legally blind. She won five gold medals and one silver at the 1992 and 1996 Paralympics, then ran the 1500 meters at the 2000 Sydney Olympics and finished eighth.
Lex Gillette, long jumper
Lex Gillette was diagnosed with a detached retina shortly after turning eight and became totally blind. He has won five Paralympic silver medals in the long jump, from 2004 to 2020, and set a world record of 6.77 meters in 2015.
Famous Blind People in Public Life
David Blunkett, British politician
David Blunkett was born blind because of a rare genetic disorder that left his optic nerves underdeveloped. In 1997 he became Britain’s first blind cabinet minister, as Secretary of State for Education and Employment, and he served as Home Secretary from 2001 to 2004.
Chen Guangcheng, human rights activist
Chen Guangcheng lost his sight at about six months old after a fever. A self-taught “barefoot lawyer”, he documented forced late-term abortions in Shandong province in 2005, and in April 2012 he escaped house arrest to the US Embassy in Beijing.
Jacques Lusseyran, French Resistance leader
Jacques Lusseyran became totally blind at seven in a school accident. At 17 he co-founded the Volunteers of Liberty, a French Resistance group, and he was arrested in 1943, deported to Buchenwald and liberated in April 1945. He later wrote the memoir And There Was Light.
Famous Blind People From India
Ravindra Jain, music composer
Ravindra Jain was born blind in Aligarh in 1944. He composed the music for the 1985 film Ram Teri Ganga Maili and the 1987 television series Ramayan, and received the Padma Shri in 2015.
Ved Mehta, writer
Ved Mehta lost his sight at age three to cerebrospinal meningitis. Born in Lahore, then part of British India, he was a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1961 to 1994 and wrote the 12-part autobiography Continents of Exile.
Shekhar Naik, blind cricket captain
Shekhar Naik is a blind cricketer who captained India’s blind cricket team to World Cup titles in 2012 and 2014. He received the Padma Shri in 2017. To see how the game works, read our guide to how blind people play cricket.
Pranjal Patil, IAS officer
Pranjal Patil lost her sight at age six despite eye surgeries. In 2017 she ranked 124th in the civil services examination, and in October 2019 she took charge as Sub Collector of Thiruvananthapuram as India’s first woman IAS officer with a visual impairment.
Srikanth Bolla, entrepreneur
Srikanth Bolla is visually impaired and studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He founded Bollant Industries, a maker of eco-friendly packaging, in 2012, and his life inspired the 2024 film Srikanth. For more ideas on building an income, see our post on business ideas for blind people.
How Tools Opened Careers for Famous Blind People
Many of these careers depended on tools that made information accessible by touch or sound. Our overview of adaptive technology for blind users covers the tools used today.
Frequently Asked Questions About Famous Blind People
Who is the most famous blind person in the world?
No official ranking exists. Helen Keller and Stevie Wonder are among the best known, Keller for her writing and advocacy and Wonder for his music. Both are covered above, along with 34 other people.
Who was the first blind person to climb Mount Everest?
Erik Weihenmayer reached the summit of Mount Everest on 25 May 2001. He has juvenile retinoschisis and was completely blind by age 14. He later climbed the highest peak on every continent.
Who are famous blind musicians?
Stevie Wonder, Ray Charles, Andrea Bocelli, José Feliciano, Ronnie Milsap and Doc Watson are blind musicians with major careers. Wonder, Charles, Feliciano, Milsap and Watson have each won Grammy Awards. In India, Ravindra Jain composed music for films and television.
Who are famous deafblind people?
Helen Keller and Haben Girma are two well known deafblind people. Keller lost her sight and hearing at 19 months old and graduated from Radcliffe in 1904. Girma became the first deafblind graduate of Harvard Law School in 2013.
Who invented braille, and was he blind?
Louis Braille, a Frenchman, invented the braille system and was totally blind. He lost his sight after an eye injury at age three. He adapted a dot-based writing system into braille at 15 and published his method in 1829.
Who was Britain’s first blind cabinet minister?
David Blunkett was Britain’s first blind cabinet minister. He joined the cabinet in 1997 as Secretary of State for Education and Employment. He was born blind and later served as Home Secretary from 2001 to 2004.
Are there famous blind actors?
Bruce Horak is a legally blind actor who plays Hemmer on Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. Jeff Healey, a blind guitarist, also appeared in the 1989 film Road House.
Who are famous blind women?
Famous blind women include Helen Keller, Fanny Crosby, Diane Schuur, Haben Girma, Sabriye Tenberken, Wanda Díaz-Merced, Trischa Zorn and Pranjal Patil. Marla Runyan, who is legally blind, is also covered above.
Who are famous blind people from India?
Ravindra Jain, Ved Mehta, Shekhar Naik, Pranjal Patil and Srikanth Bolla are covered above. They work in music, writing, cricket, the civil service and business.
