My roommate, Kyle, is completely blind. I take him around campus and all that fun stuff, but he has started to become irritating aspy-ish lately. Since he can't see, he obviously can't read faces either, and this makes him oblivious as people start to inch away from him after he's blabbed for 20 minutes about army ants or beta fish. Even I can usually tell when people are getting bored (sort of)
I just want to know if there is any tactful way of broaching this subject with him. For example, I usually leave lot's of opportunities for people to "escape" conversations, since I have difficulty figuring out when they want to or not.
Is he an aspie too? Maybe thats why they put you together.
There is also the possibility that people are interested and YOU are misreading the signals.
I would not tell him that people may not be interested. It may be something he really enjoys, and it would be much worse if it crushed his confidence and you had to live with him very depressed.
People can tell him themselves if they wish that they have had too much of the conversation.
Not like some of us have the same problem. Is it visibly noticable that he is visually impaired? He probably is more acceptable to people then, having a visible disability rather than one that is invisible. People will say "oh, he's blind." for us, it is "oh, what a jerk!"
People can tell him themselves if he's losing their interest, and as he's got a visible disability, they're more tolerant. I've noticed that with the blind people I've known, people are more understanding as their disability is quite obvious. In some cases, they get away with invading personal space more because of their disability as people think to themselves, "Oh, he/she's blind." If we got as close, we'd be told rudely to move out of someone's space.
Yes, I agree that the other people can tell him themselves if they are losing interest in his conversation and what's to stop them from trying to steer the conversation in another direction anyway?