A Blind Client Asked How to Sign a Will He Couldn't Read

The situation

'If I can't read it, how do I know I'm not signing something wrong?' Dilshan asked that question at the start of the first meeting, before anything else was discussed. He worked as a personal support worker in Guelph, had been blind since a childhood illness, and had never made a will. His husband, Nuwan, drove long-haul routes for a trucking company and was often away for stretches of several days at a time. Neither had children. Their estate was modest by the standards of a downtown law office, an estate in the range of $120,000 to $300,000 once a small home equity share, a car, some savings, and Nuwan's share of a jointly held account were counted, but it represented everything the two of them had built together over more than a decade.

Dilshan's first language was Sinhala, and while he spoke and understood everyday English well from years of work and daily life in Canada, legal documents were a different matter. Dense, formal English, read at a normal pace, was hard for him to follow with full confidence, and he was clear that he wanted to understand exactly what he was signing rather than take someone's word for it. That mattered more to him than it might to most clients, precisely because he could not visually check a document himself before or after signing it. He had heard, secondhand, about a relative's will being challenged years earlier over a signing that nobody could properly describe after the fact, and he did not want that uncertainty hanging over Nuwan.

The plan itself was simple. Dilshan wanted everything to go to Nuwan if Nuwan survived him, and named a longtime friend as a backup beneficiary in case they died together or Nuwan predeceased him. Nuwan's own will, drafted alongside Dilshan's, mirrored that structure. Both wanted the other named as estate trustee, with the friend as an alternate. There was no dispute about who should get what. The open question was procedural: how do you make sure a will signed by a blind client, who also sometimes worked more comfortably in his first language than in formal English, will stand up cleanly if anyone ever looks at it later.

That question shaped almost every decision our office made about how the file was run, from the drafting language down to who was in the room on signing day and what was written down about what happened there.

The complication

Ontario's rules for making a valid will do not require a testator to read the document personally. A will can be validly signed by someone who cannot read it themselves, including a person who is blind or illiterate, as long as the testator understands and approves the contents. The difficulty is not legal capacity in the abstract. Dilshan had full mental capacity to make a will, understood his own assets and wishes clearly, and had no cognitive impairment of any kind. The difficulty was evidentiary: after a testator has died, nobody can ask them what happened in the signing room. If a will's validity is ever questioned, the people who were present, and what they can say about how the signing went, are often the only evidence available.

For a client who read the will personally before signing, that is rarely an issue; the signature itself, alongside two witnesses, usually tells the story. For a client who could not read the document, a bare signature and two ordinary witness signatures leave an open question a challenger could exploit years later: did this person actually know what was in the will, or did they sign something read to them incompletely, mistranslated, or rushed through without real understanding? A challenge does not need to succeed to cause damage. Even an unsuccessful one can freeze an estate for months, force Nuwan to hire a lawyer to defend a will that was, in fact, perfectly valid, and drain estate funds that were meant to support him.

Layered on top of that was the language question. Dilshan was comfortable with spoken English day to day, but a formally worded legal document, read aloud quickly, risked losing him on specific clauses, particularly the more technical language around estate trustee powers and the backup beneficiary provisions. He asked, partway through drafting, whether the will could simply be explained to him in Sinhala rather than English, since that was the language he thought most clearly in when something mattered. That request was reasonable, but it introduced a second layer of evidentiary risk on top of the first: if a translator's accuracy or independence were ever questioned, the same evidentiary gap that affects a client who cannot read a document reappears for a client who did not hear it in the language it was legally drafted in.

Nuwan's travel schedule added a practical constraint rather than a legal one. He was often away for four or five days at a stretch, and coordinating a single signing appointment where both wills could be executed together, with all the right people present, meant working around his routes rather than a standard office calendar. Scheduling around that constraint mattered because signing the two wills separately, weeks apart, would have left a period where only one spouse had a valid, updated will in place, an ordinary but avoidable risk neither of them wanted to carry longer than necessary.

What we did

We started by treating the signing itself as a separate piece of planning from the drafting, rather than an afterthought once the documents were ready. Once Dilshan's and Nuwan's instructions were finalized in plain English, we arranged for a professional interpreter fluent in Sinhala to attend the signing appointment in person, rather than relying on Nuwan or a friend to translate informally. Using a friend or family member as an interpreter for a legal signing can itself raise questions later about whether the translation was accurate or influenced by someone with a stake in the outcome, so we treated an independent, professional interpreter as a firm requirement rather than a nice-to-have.

At the appointment, the will was read aloud in full, clause by clause, in English, with the interpreter translating each section into Sinhala before moving to the next. Dilshan was asked, after each major section, in his own words, to confirm what he understood it to mean, rather than simply asked whether he agreed. That let us catch and correct one point of confusion in real time, over how the backup beneficiary provision would work if Nuwan predeceased him by only a short time, before any signature went on the page.

We used two independent witnesses who had no relationship to either the interpreter or to Nuwan, both staff at our office, so that no one in the room had any personal stake in the outcome and both could speak clearly later, if ever asked, to what they observed. We had the interpreter sign a written certificate confirming the language used, that the full document was translated section by section, and that Dilshan confirmed his understanding before signing, rather than relying on a verbal recollection years afterward.

We prepared a short written memo, placed in the file rather than the will itself, recording exactly how the signing was conducted: who was present, in what order the reading and translation happened, what questions Dilshan asked, and how they were answered. That memo was not a legal requirement, but it gave a contemporaneous account that could answer, years later, exactly the kind of question a challenge would raise.

We coordinated the appointment around one of Nuwan's stretches at home, so both wills were signed on the same day, with the same interpreter and witnesses present for both, keeping the two files consistent with each other and avoiding a gap where only one spouse's will was in place.

Finally, we gave both Dilshan and Nuwan a plain-language written summary of each will's key terms, produced in a format Dilshan's screen-reading software could read back to him at home, so he could review the substance of what he had signed independently, at his own pace, after the appointment.

The outcome

Both wills were signed cleanly, with a documented process behind them that anticipated the exact kind of question a later challenge would raise. No dispute has arisen, and none is expected; this is what prevention looks like in an estates practice, a problem that never had the chance to occur because the file was built to close it off in advance rather than defended after the fact.

The value of the extra steps is hard to see on the day of signing, since nothing dramatic happened. Dilshan and Nuwan left with two ordinary wills, mirror images of each other, worth roughly the same as any modest couple's estate plan, in the range of $120,000 to $300,000 between them. What they left with beyond the documents themselves was a signing record, the interpreter's certificate, the file memo, and two witnesses who could speak clearly about what they observed, that would answer for them if either will were ever questioned after one of them had died and could no longer explain what had happened in that room. That record cost an extra hour of appointment time and a modest interpreter's fee, a small addition against the cost, in money and delay, of even an unsuccessful challenge years down the road.

Dilshan told our office afterward that the part that mattered most to him was not the interpreter or the witnesses as legal safeguards, but the confirmation, section by section, that he actually understood what he was agreeing to before he signed it. That was the standard he had set at the first meeting, and it was the standard the file was built to meet. Nuwan, for his part, said the process gave him something he had not expected to need: a clear answer, if anyone ever asked, to how he could be sure Dilshan had understood and freely chosen everything the will said.

What you can learn from this