How a Visually Impaired Creator Uses Cameras to Live Fully
Summary
么传锡’s life traces a technology-enabled expansion of personal autonomy: from riding a bicycle by sound, entering a school for the blind and becoming a piano tuner, to regaining the freedom to travel and document life with a guide dog and a camera. Piano tuning and solo home visits were once deemed “unsuitable for a totally blind person,” but his answer has always been: “There are always more solutions than difficulties. Those who help themselves will be helped by heaven.” He repeatedly stresses that what matters is not special treatment, but the right to decide his own schedule, routes, career and way of life.
卫诗婕 notes that China has more than 17M visually impaired people, but their low visibility in everyday life does not mean their needs do not exist. Most still rarely leave home because of mobility barriers, family concerns and aversion to social interaction; at the same time, young visually impaired people are editing videos, creating content, rock climbing and flying powered paragliders. “People may have a far too subjective understanding of us”—what gets overlooked are the same everyday lives and public-service needs shared by everyone else.
A guide dog does not provide a marginal convenience; it creates a structural step-change in personal autonomy. Only about 20-30 out of every 100 dogs in training eventually graduate; 么传锡 applied in 2012 and waited four years before meeting Oscar, Shenzhen’s first guide dog, in 2016. Oscar let him “go whenever I wanted,” for work and leisure, and for the first time take his children to school himself: “I could finally take part in my children’s growth.”
Accessible products succeed or fail on the completeness of the workflow, not on the addition of an isolated feature. Taking photos on a phone requires holding the dog’s leash in one hand and the phone in the other, while a visually impaired user cannot confirm the angle; a chest-mounted wide-angle action camera frees both hands and makes recording feasible. The flip side is an airline website requiring users to photograph and upload the dog’s certificates, while platform appeals demand a photo of the user holding an ID card: “Taking and uploading photos is precisely a need for visually impaired people, yet it asks visually impaired people to take the photos themselves.”
Content platforms can give visually impaired people narrative agency, but they can also turn them into raw material for traffic. A secretly filmed video of 么传锡 taking his child to school was recast as a tearjerker about a child unable to leave blind parents and needing to care for them, attracting more than 300K likes; when he tried to complain, an inaccessible verification process stopped him. That experience also made him initially resist filming Oscar, until their final farewell made him realize: “I left far too little footage of him.”
The main bottleneck to public acceptance lies less with ordinary passers-by than with institutional managers’ risk logic and lagging awareness. 么传锡 says passengers and bystanders often argue on his behalf when he faces unfair treatment; the parties that repeatedly refuse guide dogs are managers at buses, venues and other institutions. “You can choose not to know, but you cannot refuse to learn.” A concert hall eventually allowed 糖球 inside, and the dog did not bark once; the people there consequently formed a new understanding of guide dogs.
么传锡’s vision of the future is not technology replacing everything, but different tools handing off to one another to enable an autonomous life. He follows autonomous driving and brain-computer interfaces, and in 2021 tried a vehicle from a Shenzhen high-level autonomous-driving company; his ideal combination is for a self-driving car to handle longer distances, with a guide dog covering “the last mile.” The underlying need has remained constant: “I’m in my 30s, nearing 40, and I’ve always been pursuing a free life and an independent space.”
Deep dive
1. Freedom Started Not as a Slogan, but by Riding Out of the Alley by Sound
么传锡 was born with underdeveloped eyeballs. He did have some light perception as a child, but can barely remember it now; when neighborhood children played, he “did his best to play with them too.” On a bicycle, he used the bike’s “clattering and rattling” to gauge where he was in the alley. Even after collisions left him bleeding from the head, he did not stop.
What first made him aware of the difference was not darkness itself, but the fact that everyone his age could go to school. While he was unable to enroll, he went to the classroom to listen from outside, and his sister once hid him under a desk. He could recite lessons and classical poems that other children could not, which caught a teacher’s attention.
In the summer of 1995, a teacher received documents at a meeting about plans to establish a local school for the blind and immediately thought of him. When he rushed there for the first time, all the places were taken, and he cried and refused to leave. After people promised, “You’ll be the first one admitted next year,” he entered the school the following year and completed primary school, middle school and vocational secondary education.
2. Piano Tuning Broke the Career Barrier That “Blind People Can Only Do Massage”
After completing primary school, middle school and vocational secondary school at the school for the blind, he went on to study massage. The program notes that for many visually impaired people at the time, earning enough to support themselves and gaining a measure of dignity already felt like more than they could hope for. But at 18, when 么传锡 learned that he could train as a piano tuner, he suddenly felt that “life had a direction.”
Almost no one supported the career change. His family, parents, classmates and teachers all believed massage was better suited to blind people because it did not require exposure to wind and sun. His tuning instructor also explicitly advised against a totally blind person making solo home visits, fearing the obstacles he would encounter on the way into people’s homes. He admits he was “far from confident” himself, but went ahead under the pressure.
When he first put his hands on a piano, it felt to him “like a large table.” The more than 200 tuning pins and densely packed internal structure initially left him bewildered. His teacher taught him that “everything has its own pattern.” He later extended that principle to life: “You have to stay calm. Calmness always opens up a way forward.”
3. Low Visibility Does Not Mean Visually Impaired People Lack a Desire to Live
么传锡 acknowledges that people who can genuinely go out independently remain a minority today; reluctance to socialize and travel may stem from the individual, the family and other factors at once. But the young friends he has met are already editing videos, filming content and trying extreme sports. He himself has tried rock climbing and powered paragliding.
卫诗婕 asks about the divide through the fear a sighted person might feel inside a completely dark theater. 么传锡 recalls his sister once crying in panic in heavy fog because she could not see anything, while he thought, “What’s the big deal?” He says he has long been accustomed to darkness. The contrast shows how familiarity changes one’s experience of the dark, while whether visually impaired people can get out into the world remains shaped by personal, family and environmental factors.
4. Oscar Turned Guide Work from Obstacle Avoidance into Life Autonomy
Seeking greater freedom of movement, 么传锡 applied to the Dalian guide-dog base in 2012. Only about 20-30 out of every 100 dogs in training graduate; after waiting four years, he met Oscar on August 9, 2016. Oscar would later become Shenzhen’s first guide dog.
At their first meeting, he left the scent of a treat on his hand and counted silently to 3 before letting Oscar eat it. After finishing, the dog let him stroke its fur and then rolled over to expose its belly. The trainer explained that showing its most vulnerable area meant trust; the two began building a relationship from there.
Oscar worked for 5 years, taking the children to school and accompanying 么传锡 to work, always “regardless of wind or rain.” In the past, every activity had to fit around the schedules of family members or volunteers. With a guide dog, he could work, socialize, travel and pursue leisure on his own terms. More importantly, he could take his children to school himself for the first time: “I could finally take part in my children’s growth.”
They visited Qingdao, took a cruise and traveled as far as Dunhuang in Gansu, hiking through the Yadan landforms and the desert. New environments excited Oscar and made him walk faster. The guide dog expanded not just a commuting route, but the radius of life its owner could imagine and reach.
5. Normal Treatment Often Has to Be Asserted; Barriers Are Buried in the Process
In the spring of 2017, a bus first refused to open its front door, then closed the rear door and drove away as 么传锡 and Oscar turned toward it. Other passengers recorded the license plate and joined the complaint. The hotline demanded his transit-card number and asked someone beside him to read it out; after another passenger did so and applied pressure, the next bus was notified and stopped to pick them up.
卫诗婕 summed up the episode: “Many forms of normal treatment have to be won through resistance.” 么传锡 also stresses that ordinary passers-by are generally highly accepting; the greater conflict is with public-venue managers who refuse access simply “because it’s a dog.” “You can choose not to know, but you cannot refuse to learn.”
Air travel turns the same conflict into a digital workflow: visually impaired passengers must photograph and upload the guide dog’s vaccination certificate and work certificate, while the website itself may not be accessible. To 么传锡’s understanding, the US and EU generally require only a form at booking declaring that a service dog will be traveling; domestic procedures also ask for detailed information about the person’s type of disability, which he considers a privacy issue.
6. Oscar Went Through Four Separations; Goodbye Turned Missing Footage into Regret
In the spring of 2021, Oscar suddenly began crying out in pain at night. An examination found severe bone spurs, and the base recommended retirement at age 8. 么传锡 was not certain of the cause; he only speculated that it might relate to the dog’s physical constitution, or possibly to gastrointestinal problems from picking up random objects and the use of steroid medication during treatment. He did not present any of those possibilities as conclusions.
Oscar first moved from his original family to the base, then from the base to 么传锡, and after retirement returned to the original family. In the summer of 2022, that family could no longer care for him, so he moved again to a new family in Shenyang. 卫诗婕 initially treated retirement as the second separation; 么传锡 corrected her to the third, though in reality it had already become the fourth.
The original family hoped he would bring Oscar back to Shenzhen, but both he and his wife are blind, 糖球 was already with them, and their accommodation could not support caring for 2 dogs. After retirement, Oscar was no longer a guide dog and could only travel in an oxygen cabin. 么传锡 also mentioned a transport accident that had occurred not long before, adding to his concerns about the safety of the journey.
么传锡 booked a flight for November 28, but Oscar died at 3:20 p.m. on November 25. He insisted that his family temporarily preserve the body. During his final touch, he could still identify Oscar by its build, the hairless patch on its neck and an old scar on its nose. When he touched it again after the cremation furnace came out, it was “just a pile of white bones.”
7. A Camera Made Him the Author of His Story, Not the Subject of Secret Footage
么传锡 had “no good feelings” toward short video platforms in his early years. Someone secretly filmed him and Oscar taking his child to school, then rewrote the child’s distress and reluctance to board the school bus as a story about a child unable to leave blind parents and needing to stay behind to care for them. The fabricated narrative drew more than 300K likes and turned the family into a “tearjerker prop.”
He clarified the facts in the comments and contacted the platform to complain, but was asked to take a photo holding his ID and then navigate a complicated upload process. At the time, the only other person at home was his similarly blind wife, and the appeal ultimately went nowhere. The experience made him wary of documenting his life and led him to deliberately avoid “commercializing” Oscar, leaving very little footage of their daily life.
When 影石Insta360 recruited visually impaired experience officers, he initially wanted to document his tuning work and trips with 糖球. A phone required one hand for the leash and the other for filming, making it unstable and impossible for him to confirm the framing. A chest-mounted action camera with a wide-angle lens freed both hands and brought more of the surrounding environment into the shot.
He asked to take the trial camera, originally scheduled to be returned after about a week, to Shenyang to document his reunion with Oscar. “His achievements should not be buried.” He ultimately preserved the farewell on film, allowing Oscar’s story and the injustices faced by guide dogs to be seen by more people.
8. Real-World Use Exposes Misconceptions—and Updates Everyone’s Judgment
卫诗婕 describes another young visually impaired experience officer who had rarely gone out before. To complete a filming assignment, she asked a friend to accompany her to a flower market. Her friend described the sunset, streets and flowers along the way; she smelled the flowers and captured the experience on camera. The woman later said the camera gave her a reason to step outside.
When 糖球 accompanied 么传锡 to the seaside, the original family had said the dog liked swimming, but it resisted strongly once it entered the water. 么传锡 explained that 糖球 was in working mode and believed entering the water posed a danger to its owner. He admits he “didn’t think that much” while filming and accepted the explanation.
Not long after 糖球 came to live with 么传锡, they went to a concert hall. The venue worried that 糖球 would bark. It first offered to arrange transport for him without the dog, then suggested leaving the dog outside, and finally proposed that both of them stay outside and watch the livestream. 么传锡 rejected each option: “That’s too special. I don’t need it. I can skip the concert.” What he was asserting was entry into the same space, not a separate set of substitute accommodations.
The venue ultimately allowed 糖球 inside. The dog would excitedly stand up during applause, but did not bark from beginning to end. 么传锡 used the episode to correct another misconception: guide dogs have not had their instincts erased. Like people, they have “two states—on the job and off the job.” Professional training does not mean losing their vitality.
9. Accessibility Ends Not in Special Treatment, but Independent Living Built Through a Relay of Tools
When people encounter a guide dog, 么传锡’s “four don’ts and one ask” are: do not touch, call to, feed or refuse the dog, and ask whether help is needed. A dog can avoid obstacles but may not know its owner’s destination. When a person and dog are circling in an unfamiliar place, asking “Where are you trying to go?” is the help that actually works.
卫诗婕 points out that no matter how long or densely laid tactile paving is, it can still lead users into danger if treated merely as an image-building project. 么传锡 hopes public managers’ thinking will catch up with their understanding of guide dogs and accessibility. His request of ordinary people is much simpler: “Don’t pay excessive attention to me. That is respect. We’re all the same.”
From bicycles and school for the blind to piano tuning, guide dogs and cameras, 么传锡 has continued pursuing “a free life and an independent space.” He follows autonomous driving and brain-computer interfaces, imagining a future in which a self-driving car takes them most of the way and a guide dog handles “the last mile.” He is not waiting for technology to live in his place; he wants technology to return the power of choice to him.