There are no corresponding up-to-date statistics available for Hong Kong. The jobless rate has fallen to 3.3 per cent, but the Society for the Blind's careers support manager, Mok Kim-wing, could only tell me anecdotally that the unemployment level of the visually impaired was 'much higher'. The problem, he said, was not that the blind were unqualified for positions, but that potential employers did not believe they could cope with the same working conditions as sighted people.

As a result, most of Hong Kong's sight disabled do not have jobs and those that do have usually been typecast into roles like telephone operators and masseurs. Rarely are they given the opportunity to have jobs that are better paid, more satisfying and require responsibility.

I do. But I know of only three other people around the world who work for daily newspapers who, like me, are also blind. We bring, as Mr Paterson will, a different perspective to how a job is done. A lack of vision means that other senses become important. Blind people pay more attention to what is said and heard. Their circumstances require developing strong memories. People we deal with are judged not by how they look, but their personality and manner. What our sighted counterparts often fail to hear, smell, feel or sense, we pick up.

These are matters that potential employers rarely consider. In their haste to wonder during interviews whether we can find the toilet or can catch the right bus to work each day, they subconsciously put us to the bottom of the application list. To voice this publicly is to discriminate; to leave it unsaid and choose a sighted person who may not be as well qualified is the norm.

Given the circumstances, it is not surprising that Mr Paterson's appointment in the wake of the sex scandal involving his predecessor, Elliot Spitzer, is being hailed by the blind and disabled in internet blogs, chat rooms and on websites as something special. As Carl Jacobsen, the president of the New York state branch of the National Federation of the Blind told me, the appointment sent a signal to the average person that perhaps they should take a second look at blind people.

Becoming New York state governor is no mean feat; with 19 million people, it is the US' third most populous state. Mr Paterson is not only the nation's second legally blind governor, but its fourth ever - and New York state's first - African-American one.

He gained the job through ability. A Columbia University graduate, he was elected in 1985 to the state senate seat his father, a former New York secretary of state, had held. He became the minority leader in 2003 and three years later, deputy governor.

Blindness was never an issue. Nor should it be with other visually impaired people as they go about their lives, be it shopping, crossing a street or applying for a job. Affording equality, whether through education, technology - or, most basically - fair treatment, is the simple request of all disabled people. Mr Paterson exemplifies what blind people can achieve when these principles are applied. First, though, they have to be given a chance.

Peter Kammerer is the Post's foreign editor