Additionally, it campaigns to make services such as healthcare, education and public transport safer and more accessible to people with visual impairments.

[7][8] The first meeting, which was held at 33 Cambridge Square, Hyde Park, London, involved founder Thomas Rhodes Armitage (a physician who was partially sighted) and Daniel Conolly, W W Fenn[a] and Dr James Gale[b] (all three of whom were blind).

[11] In 2023, The Duchess of Edinburgh opened the organisation's new headquarters in the Grimaldi Building on Pentonville Road, London, which has been adapted to cater for the needs of people who are blind, partially sighted or neurodivergent.

[25] RNIB's extensive range of reading services includes RNIB Bookshare – a free library of over one million items, which supports students and others in education with a vast collection of accessible textbooks and materials[26] – and Talking Books, a service first established in 1935,[27] which offers thousands of audio books, both fiction and non-fiction.

[28] RNIB’s ECLO (Eye Care Liaison Officers) service aims to help patients understand the impact of a sight loss diagnosis and to direct them to appropriate sources of support.

In 2023, the charity played a key role[32][33][34] in a national campaign to scrap plans to close ticket offices in train stations.

[40] After the 2024 general election RNIB delivered an open letter to 10 Downing Street highlighting that according to its research roughly 87% of the UK's citizens with visual impairments were denied their right to vote in secret.

[41] The campaign follows a 2019 court judgement that declared the UK's current voting arrangements for people with blindness or visual impairments to be unlawful.

RNIB pointed out that in spite of the judgement, the majority of the UK's visually impaired voters do so using technology that requires them to be accompanied into the voting booth and have their choices read aloud by an assistant.

In 2020, the Commission ruled that there had been significant management, oversight, and staffing shortcomings which had led to repeated incidents where young people in the charity's care were put at risk or harmed.

[6][4] The Charity Commission's chief executive described this investigation as "one of the worst examples we have uncovered of poor governance and oversight having a direct impact on vulnerable people.