I'm sitting here waiting for my eye doctor and I began to wonder how people with vision as poor as mine lived before technology gave them the ability of corrected vision.
Does anybody know this? Perhaps it's the wrong sub.
So obviously the answer is likely to vary based on the level of impairment involved and the particular society involved. You may be interested to know that eyeglasses were invented roughly 200 years before the printing press so most people probably just didn't notice any lack of visual acuity beyond extreme impairment. I didn't know I was terribly nearsighted until after I'd completed university and took a driving test. After a certain point though you'd be functionally blind just like folks today who have uncorrectable vision.
Interestingly it was far less common for people to have problems. Myopia is a fairly modern disease that appears to be caused by being indoors a great deal when very young. The eye develops abnormally indoors for some as yet undetermined reason. In the last 30 years the rate of myopia in the US has nearly doubled. The effect is even more pronounced in some Asian countries. China and Korea both have had huge increases.