Do I Have To Be Blind?

I mentioned this last night, that my daughter just casually asked the other day while getting dressed, “do I have to be blind?”   This give a little insight into her mind, or perhaps the mind of a child.   She doesn’t remember being able to see, well, anything she says.   I know she understands a three-dimensional world and how sighted people can see things beyond the range of what they can interact with tactilely.   She understands some of this because of sound and how sounds have direction and magnitude, but sight is different.

Through sight we can take in vast amounts of information from a single glance.   The, “picture is worth a thousand words” phrase comes to mind only in this case it’s more like, “is worth a thousand data points”.   On a piece of paper in an instant we can tell there are drawings, or a picture or a cartoon.   We can See that there’s a title, subtitle, multiple columns, different fonts, maybe a bulleted list.  Important things might be highlighted with color and the main topic can be clear from the instant sight-reading of words.  

A blind person has to read through the information one character or braille cell at a time.   Periodicals are printed in braille and available to blind people.   I can’t even imagine the challenge in just getting to the article you want to read in a braille periodical.   I have a very small sample of what this is like from some of the children’s braille books I’ve downloaded or read with my daughter.  

As a sighted person we see the cover page and open the book.   There is a lot of junk at the beginning in small print at the bottom of the page about ISBN number, author, publisher, printing date, print version, etc.   There is the interior title page.  There is the chapter index.   Pages have numbers and once you get through all that hoopla, you get to the start of the book proper.  

It doesn’t take a sighted person long to learn to flip until you get to what looks like the actual first page of Green Eggs and Ham.   My son picked this up well before he was able to read well even.   Braille books aren’t that easy.  

While most of us don’t care about all that, “hoopla” before the start of the story, it can’t be skipped—it has to be included.   And that means typically lots and lots of braille you have to skip through to find the start of the book.   Skipping isn’t so easy though.   You can’t visually see that the small font is over and now you’re looking at a great big title on a page standing alone.   Braille Cells are Braille Cells.   There are ways to indicate bold, italics, strong type, etc., but it’s still a sea of dots on paper.   I don’t know how a braille reader finds their way quickly through a book, let alone a periodical.

Think about all the stuff on a single page of periodical.   There are the ad blocks, the tiny type, the captions to pictures, the veritable sea of information our eyes sift through in an instant to find the particular thing we’re looking for on the page.   Or pages when we’re scanning a magazine in the checkout line to find out how to lose ten pounds in ten days, just like J. Lo.

I downloaded some books to put on my daughter’s Orbit reader a while back.   There is a site I can get all manner of books in braille format to load onto the Orbit refreshable braille reader.   Once I load the book, my daughter can have the braille pop up on a single line.   She presses the down arrow and it goes to the next line.   At the time I last did this I could barely read braille.   It was nightmarishly confusing to try and get the reader to display the beginning of the story because at twenty-four characters per line, it took forever to get to the story itself.  

I went back to the file, opened it up on the computer and cut out the large chunk of information before the story.   At the time, close to a year ago, the books my daughter wanted to read were things like Goldilocks and the Three Bears.   The entire story was less content than the introduction information at the start of the book.  

I just looked up and realized the title of this blog post has nothing to do at all with what I ended up writing about—the challenges of quickly sifting through information as a blind person.  So let me circle back to the beginning to end this post.

It was poignant that she would ask, so innocently, if she had to be blind.  What do you say to that?  I told her that some things we couldn’t control.   I said I’d love to be eight feet tall so I could slam dunk the basketball, but unfortunately I was always going to be 5’4” and wouldn’t ever be able to dunk the ball.   I don’t know if that made any sense at all, I though after I said it, because she probably has no memory of what our basketball goal was like in the driveway.

But it seemed to make enough sense to her and she seemed to be happy with the explanation.   I wish I could have told her a different answer.   We’d do anything, if we had a choice about her being blind.

The Big Boy Update:  My son was in the car with my parents several days ago.   After riding around for a bit he asked my father, who is a careful and deliberate driver, “Gramps, can you get a ticket for driving too slow?”  

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is having Aditi over for a sleepover tonight.   Aditi is the other VI student in my daughter’s class.   The ladies have been having a good time having planned out an Easter egg hunt (which my son and I did for them) and s’mores after dinner.   They’re now up in the bonus room, preparing to stay up all night.   As an aside, Aditi is significantly visually impaired, but she seems near 20/20 vision in comparison to my daughter.   She can see, well things.   She knows what’s. “over there” and can do lots of things my daughter will never be able to do again.   Aditi is very sweet and exceptionally mature.   Her mother and I decided we’re going to get the two of them together much more often since they get along so well.