Once at a conference of vision-impaired people, I was manning a table where participants could purchase braille supplies. As part of the transaction, the participant needed to sign their name. When I asked one completely blind person to sign their name, their companion interrupted me and said, “totally blind people can’t sign their names.”

This surprised me because I hadn’t heard this before. I have always had some vision, and I learned to sign my name. I had never heard that people who had been blind from birth couldn’t sign their names. So, I asked some of my more knowledgeable friends what they thought. They said that any person, blind since birth or not, can sign their names.

Even though I can’t see what I write, I still use my signature. Here are three techniques that I’ve seen that blind people use to sign their names on the dotted line.

For the first technique, let’s say for signing a receipt, it requires that a straight edge is placed on the line where the signatures supposed to go. The blind person uses this as a guide for when they write their name.

The second technique utilizes a signature guide. A signature guide is made of firm cardboard or metal and has a little box kite into it. When it comes time to sign, a blind person puts the box with their signature is supposed to go and write inside that box.

The third technique for writing the signature is the simplest of all. It is to use a rubber stamp that contains your signature. When it comes time to sign the receipt, it takes a second or two to stamp your signature. All done.

Even though I have been legally blind for much of my life, I still hear questions that I haven’t heard before and don’t know the answers. In these cases, I go to the experts at my local chapter of the National Federation of the Blind. I don’t only get the correct answers, I get a deeper understanding of what it means to be blind and how low vision can be reduced to an inconvenience with the right attitude and information.