You can be legally blind without being totally blind. My wife is legally blind w/o her contacts, but hers is correctable w/ contacts. She can still browse TD.WIN without her contacts, she just closes one eye and holds her phone right up to her face at full brightness. It's funny, she wake me up sometimes at night by accident, her phone is like 100 watt light bulb.

I think it's not that hard to get a photo sitting in a cockpit, I had quite a few from when I was a kid. I went to air shows and sat in just about everything the air force had.