A lady has continued to pay her favourite game even though she has lost her sight. After a suffering a stroke her vision began to fade and for many people this would have certainly resulted in the end of their bingo entertainment. But the keen bingo fan, who often played more than a dozen cards memorised the positions of the numbers on the cards before she lost her site completely.

Her son, Bill Archer, noticed on one occasion while joining his mother that she was covering up the wrong numbers, and did not say anything until after she had claimed bingo.

After the bingo caller had confirmed she had the winning ticket her son pointed out the error thinking that his mother had been very lucky on this occasion. His mother replied: "Oh, I forgot to turn it over. I was playing the card on the other side."

While hopefully in the future online bingo sites will be able to be more flexible towards people with disabilities bingo clubs have been going the extra mile for customers for many years.

During a visit to the Beacon Bingo in Loughborough club a few years ago, I witnessed how one customer in her 90’s, was losing her vision and could only see numbers and letters that were at least an inch tall. She had the tickets enlarged to A4 size so she could still play. A member of the staff at the club would type all the numbers of each ticket into a spreadsheet and then each ticket was printed off to one piece of paper. I also watched on a quiet afternoon session how one lady played a whole ROW of cash bingo boards (23 in total), she would run up and down the 5 metre row sliding the shutters over the numbers and then back down the row for the next number. Most people would struggle to play 2 or 3 boards while sat at a table, but this lady knew every number on every board on the row and was fit enough to be running backwards and forwards sometimes for sometimes more than 60 numbers. She never missed a number either!

She didn’t do it very often but it was very impressive to watch.

No doubt in the future, online bingo sites will have the option to just view the ticket the full size of the screen to aid players with vision problems.