Most character roles rely on vision to get their good stuff going. If you can't see an opponent, you're not going to hit them easily, be it with a sword or a spell. Even buffing and battlefield control are out for a caster, and noncasters can do even less stuff.
There's really only two ways in general to go about playing a blind PC:
You either have no visual perception, and no way to compensate for the lack, and in a game of D&D, that just plain sucks. You might be able to play a successful blind basketweaver, but in most campaigns, that's not going to help your party save the world.
Or you manage to get some other-than-visual perception that satisfies the requirements of aiming a spell or attack - blindsense, scent or tremorsense at the bare minimum, blindsight would be better. For example, you could play a Grimlock.
But in this case, you're foregoing the whole point of playing a blind character in the first place, aren't you? If you can still 'see', albeit with other organs than your eyes, you're not really playing a blind character at all.
The closest you might come to playing a not totally ineffective blind PC is sucking very hard at low levels, then getting a means to compensate that doesn't shut out all downsides to being blind. For example, you might play a warrior type with Blind-Fight, who later picks up some kind of blindsense, and even later, blindsight. This requires spending quite a bit of your WBL on the right magic items, though, or working hard on finding the right class/feat combo.
I'll recommend something else, though (this requires working with your DM): play a blind Undead of some kind (say, a blind Necropolitan) and get the Lifesense feat (Libris Mortis). This way, you're able to 'see' living creatures perfectly, but objects and Constructs are still 'invisible' to you. So you'll get the stumbling-over-a-chair thing to humorous effect, but can still contribute in combat. Maybe you could get your DM to accept your blindness as two flaws, netting you two feats (one of which would be Lifesense, obviously).
You can work the blindness thing into your back story easily (blinded, then killed in a gruesome manner, by archenemy, whom you came back from the dead to punish for).
Quite similarly, you could play a telepathic creature with the Mindsight feat (Lords of Madness).
