I would like to contribute a small point to Sujata’s text on Blindness below. She said:

A reviewer at the Amazon website commented that this style of punctuating paralleled the reader's experience with that of the blind characters.

That would make it seem that Saramago contrived such a punctuating system for this particular novel, with a particular view in mind. But the same idiosyncratic punctuation is found elsewhere in his earlier work (for instance, in passages of Baltasar and Blimunda) and also in later novels. According to the author, his parsimonious use of punctuation marks “is related to what, in musical terms, is called the tempo, or the measure [of speech]. It is less the rhythm than the measure and the tempo. It is related to how the sentence itself is built”; he adds, furthermore, that “when we speak, we don’t use punctuation marks”. Rather than a local contrivance calculated specifically for the blind, Saramago’s peculiar punctuation is part of a more general attempt to approximate the qualities of real speech on the page.

(Readers of Portuguese may check his declarations here: http://www.usinadeletras.com.br/exibelotexto.php?cod=5081&cat=Ensaios&vinda=S)