Blindness can be a difficult situation to find yourself in, but it's never a hindrance for anyone to live their life to the fullest and pursue their potential. History has countless examples of people who, in spite of their physical limitations, have gone on to live a full life and made great contributions to the world.

In honour of World Sight Day, a global event that seeks to raise awareness on preventable blindness and vision loss, here is a list of famous and accomplished people with blindness and a visual impairment that have greatly contributed in their own chosen fields.

Helen Keller (1880 - 1968)

Probably the most famous person with deafblindness in the world, Helen Keller was an American writer, activist, lecturer and socialist. Helen was not born deaf and blind. At the age of 19 months, she contracted an illness described by doctors as "an acute congestion of the stomach and the brain" that robbed her of sight and hearing. Helen was the first deafblind person to finish college, graduating from Radcliffe College with honours in 1904.

Helen went on to become an accomplished author, having published several books in her lifetime, and a world-famous speaker, campaigning for birth control, women's suffrage, civil rights for black people and protested against war and child labor. She was an advocate for disability rights, arguing vehemently against segregation and exclusion long before the social model of disability was expounded by disability rights advocates.

Laura Bridgman (1829 - 1889)

Laura Bridgman was the first person with deafblindness to receive a formal education, 50 years before Helen Keller. She was born in Hanover, New Hampshire to hardworking New England farmers. Laura was sick with scarlet fever when she was two years old. When the fever had past, Laura had lost her sight, hearing, sense of smell and nearly all of her sense of taste.

Laura was educated at the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Boston where she learned to communicate by touch. After she mastered language, Laura's curriculum was much like the other pupils. She attended classes and studied various subjects such as reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, history, physiology and philosophy.

Laura lived at Perkins for the rest of her life. She lived in one of the cottages with the students and taught needlework. She sold her needlework pieces, which used to buy gifts for friends and give contributions to the poor.

Esref Armagan (1953 - )

Known as "the artist with no eyes," Esref Armagan defies convention by producing works of art just with the sense of touch. Esref was born blind to an impoverished Turkish family. He had not received any formal schooling, but he has taught himself to write and print. Esref has been drawing and painting in oil with his fingers for the past 35 years.

An unconventional artist needs an unconventional technique. He uses a Braille stylus to etch out an outline of his drawing. Oil paint is then applied with his fingers and left to dry before another color is applied to keep it from smudging. Remarkably, Esref's art works not only show rich colors but as well as visual perspective. His art works are produced without the help from any individual.

Esref has also produced his own style in doing portraits. A sighted person draws around a photograph, which he then turns over. Using his left hand, Esref transfers what he feels unto another piece of paper, later adding color with his fingers. He has done portraits of notable Turkish citizens, including the current president, prime minister and the former first lady.

Credit: YouTube/kişisel başarı

Erik Weihenmayer (1968 - )

Despite losing his sight at the age of 13, Erik Weihenmayer has become one of the most accomplished adventurers in the world. He has helped redefine what it means to be blind by becoming the only blind person who reached the summit of Mt. Everest on May 25, 2001. Erik has also completed the Seven Summits, climbing all seven highest peaks of the seven continents in September 2002. He has written the books Touch the Top of the World: A Blind Man's Journey to Climb Farther than The Eye Can See, his memoir; and The Adversity Advantage, Turning Everyday Struggles Into Everyday Greatness.

Erik lost his sight from juvenile retinoschesis. Whilst going blind from this rare condition, Erik struggled to hang on to his life in the sighted world. He turned to wrestling and became a prominent force in high school, even representing Connecticut in the National Junior Freestyle Wrestling Championship. He also tried rock climbing and found that he's a natural at climbing up a face by using his hands and feet to find holds. Erik attended Boston College and graduated with a double major in English and Communications. He worked as a middle school teacher and a wrestling coach at the Phoenix country Day School.

Andrea Bocelli (1952 - )

Andrea Bocelli is hailed as one of the greatest opera stars in the world today. Born in Lajatico, Italy, Andréa became blind at the age of 12 due to congenital glaucoma and a blow to the head during a soccer game. Andrea graduated with a law degree from the University of Pisa. He only started his singing career in the late 1980s when he started performing in piano bars throughout Italy. He signed a contract in 1993 after a scout heard him sing during a party, which eventually jump started his career.

Andrea has worked with the likes of Luciano Pavarotti, Sarah Brightman and Celine Dion. His greatest hits include "con Te Partiro" (Time To Say Goodbye), a duet he did with Sarah Brightman, and "Vivo Per Lei" (I Live For Her), which has been translated in French, German and Spanish.

Kent Cullers (1949 - )

Kent Cullers is an American astrophysicist who has developed techniques for radio telescope signal detection and processing for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence. Kent was born seven weeks prematurely in El Reno, Oklahoma. He was put in an incubator with pure oxygen to save his life. The excess oxygen damaged his retinas, leaving him totally blind.

His father, a physicist, used to read to Kent astronomy books when he was a child. This is said to have influenced his later aspirations. He first studied psychology, but shifted to physics midway through college against great resistance. Kent received his PhD in physics from the University of California, Berkeley in 1980.

Kent joined NASA's SETI program after graduating from Berkeley and worked as the Targeted Search Signal Detection Team Leader with the SETI Institute from 1985 to 1990. From 1990 to 1994, Kent was the Signal Detection Subsystem Manager for the High Resolution Microwave Survey Project at the NASA Ames Research Center. He led The SETI Research and Technology Effort from 1993 to 1994. He resigned from NASA in 1995 and rejoined SETI Institute as a senior scientist and project manager for Project Phoenix, the SETI Institute's continuation of the targeted search portion of the HRMs. He has retired from the SETI Institute in 2005.

Kent was portrayed as the fictional character Kent Clark in the movie "Contact."

Christine Ha (1979 - )

Dubbed as the "Blind Chef", Christine showed the world that cooking using your other senses other than sight is possible when she won the season 3 MasterChef title. Christine suffers from neuromyelitis optica, where a person's own immune system attacks the spinal cord and optic nerves. She was diagnosed in 2004 and was almost completely blind by 2007.

Christine has never studied cooking, but she has a large following on her food blog. She won seven times in both individual and team challenges in the third season of "MasterChef," although she had also been in the bottom group twice. She won the title on September 10, 2012 and took home $250,000, the "MasterChef" trophy and a cookbook deal. Her cookbook, "Recipes from my Home Kitchen: Asian and American Comfort Food," was released in 2014.

T.V. Raman (1965 - )

T.V. Raman is a blind computer scientist who was trained as a mathematician. He's working at Google Research and specializes in accessibility research. Raman has developed several accessibility tools for computers, including the Emacspeak audio desktop; Audio System for Technical Readings (ASTER); Oral CSS, which produces rich auditory presentations from web content; EForms or next generation webforms; XHTML +Voice, which enables multimodal web through voice interaction; Google Accessible Search for finding accessible content on the web; and Eyes-Free, speech enabled Android Google applications.