To See Or Not To See, Is That The Question?
This post has it all, John Mayer lyrics, a reference to the obscure 80’s film Mask starring Sam Elliot and Cher, former MTV heart-throb Daisy Fuentes…need I say more?
I was only 22 when I became statutorily blind. Beyond the initial shock of what amounted to be a mental, more so than physical gut punch, I always maintained a surprisingly calm, almost eerie, positive outlook about the whole “losing my eyesight” thing. For starters, I still had a little bit of useable vision in my right eye which is more than what many people who are considered “blind” can say. Plus, I was still relatively young with my whole life ahead of me. Certainly, there were medical breakthroughs and scientific advancements on the horizon that would hold the promise of a potential cure. So I believed, and to an extent still do believe, that one day I will be able to see again.
That was 24 years ago, and unless I’m missing something, the medical and scientific community are unfortunately no closer to coming up with a cure for restoring my eyesight. That’s not to say that there haven’t been other notable advancements which could potentially hold the cure for other types of visual disorders, but the retina and optic nerve are a trickier proposition. I often try to explain it by comparing it to the most complex engineering problem you could think up, since the optic nerve is essentially a bundle of millions of tiny wires, so repairing a severed optic nerve would require figuring out how to map and rewire millions of these microscopic circuits. And this also assumes that doctors and scientists are able to solve the bigger problem of how to transplant or regenerate the retina, but as of now, this sort of science remains more Star Trek than New England Journal of Medicine.
I say all of this, not to gripe about the medical and scientific communities or complain about the lack of progress that has been made. Rather, I simply offer these observations up as commentary from a person with a disability. As someone, it turns out, has been made an unwilling spectator to a runaway freight train of a world that constantly seems to be picking up steam. It’s funny how the passage of time can mess with your psyche, especially as someone who used to be able to see, who now finds myself needing to visualize the world around me. Its like I live with feet in two different worlds – the real world that has continued to evolve along and change over these past 24 years, and another world, that remains frozen in time, and only exists in my head as a mental snapshot of the world I knew before I became blind.
I rely on this second world more than you would think. After all, I have more than two decades of memories and experiences that I can draw on, which is something that I’m careful not to take for granted. Sometimes this gets me in trouble or puts me in awkward situations, like when I’m giving directions and I refer to a landmark that was bulldozed more than twenty years ago. Or like the time my brother-in-law Jeff, my wife’s cousin Scott and I were hanging out, you know, being guys, and talking about actresses and supermodels who we thought were attractive. Everyone they kept bringing up were people who weren’t even famous until after I lost my eyesight, so I only knew them by name, and had absolutely no idea what they looked like. Finally, they asked me to name someone I thought was attractive back in the day, and for some reason all I could muster up from the old memory banks was Daisy Fuentes, which I of course haven’t been able to live down ever since (no offense to Ms. Fuentes!)
Now in no way do I suggest that my inability to fully participate in a conversation about leggy supermodels is somehow indicative of the types of real-world barriers I consistently face as a person with a visual disability. It is just one, rather ludicrous, example. At the same time, I’m not suggesting that the extent and severity of my disability even remotely compares to what others have to contend with. Consider someone who has been blind since birth. The only way, for instance, they can experience something like color, is through abstract means like using other sensations to try and convey something that is one hundred percent visual in nature. A good example of this is in the 1980’s film Mask, where the movie’s main character tries to explain color to a girl he likes who happens to be totally blind. He uses rocks that he has heated up or cooled to varying temperatures to illustrate his point, explaining that warm is like colors on the red part of the spectrum, and cold is more like different variations of blue.
Now I know exactly what red, blue and just about every other color looks like, not because I can see it, but because I have the capacity to recall those images from memory since I was fortunate enough to have a childhood where I was able to experience years of processing the visual world around me, all in exquisite detail. In full color.
That being said, I can’t really tell you how vivid the blues of the Caribbean Sea looked, when in 2013 my wife and I stared out the window of our plane as it descended out of the cloud bank on approach to the airport in Montego Bay, Jamaica. But in my eye’s mind I can distinctly remember looking out the window of an Eastern Airlines 747 as an 8-year old kid, taking in the bright sunshine as we skimmed along a surreal looking blanket of white pillowy clouds during our plane trip down to visit my grandma and grandpa in Ft. Lauderdale. And I guess this is the part that scares me.
How much time needs to pass by before those memories from my mind’s eye start to fade away, and are replaced with these artificially concocted images I now use to visualize the world around me. Sometimes I will catch myself dwelling on this, finding myself missing being able to see the detail of wispy white clouds as they gracefully dance across a bright blue sky, or staring up at thousands of twinkling stars, or even just looking down at the lawn and no longer being able to pick out individual blades of grass. Then the thought passes, and I just chalk it up to yet another casualty of my being statutorily blind for going on twenty-five years now.
But what about things I have never seen before, or people who have been blind their entire life? Where does actual sight and vision, or the absence of these, intersect with this more abstract concept of visualization?
I have never been to the Rocky Mountains, the furthest west I have ever traveled was to visit my sister and her family in Omaha, Nebraska, and those trips were all within the last ten years. In my younger days I’m sure I probably saw pictures of the Rocky Mountains, maybe even some that used a rainbow of vivid colors to portray scenes of majestic sunsets. But the fact remains that I still haven’t seen the Rocky Mountains, nor will I ever be able to, as long as I am still statutorily blind.
There is a line in John Mayer’s song “3x5” that goes as follows…
“Today, skies are painted colors of a cowboy's cliché,
And strange, how clouds that look like mountains in the sky are next to mountains anyway.”
Two lines. Just 25 words, and no mention of any specific colors, but somehow John Mayer was able to create the most vivid imagery in my head. Every time I hear that verse, I swear it’s as if I am standing there staring up at the Rockies. Now I don’t even know if he is describing the Rockies or some other mountain chain, nor is that really the point. The magic is in the process that took some words, just a description of a scene, and transformed it into something seemingly so real, that I could practically reach out and touch it, all through visualization.
And for the most part, this is exactly how someone who is blind or visually impaired has to interact with and process the world around them. We’re constantly using audible clues along with our other senses to augment what our eyes can’t tell us. This also means that our mind’s eye, and our ability to visualize, is only as good as the information being provided to us.
Types of sensory inputs vary from spoken directions and descriptions, to tactile resources like materials printed in braille to digital content accessed with the use of screen readers and other assistive technology. Sometimes different types of solutions are combined in an effort to enhance the user experience, such as adding voiceover to multi-media, or something like the Be My Eyes app, which allows blind or visually impaired individuals to use the built-in camera on their smart phone to connect with a sighted volunteer who can assist them with any number of common daily tasks like helping them locate an item they dropped on the floor, reading labels on household products, or figuring out what color shirt to wear with a particular pair of pants.
Of course, there is another very practical application for providing the blind and visually impaired with useful information, one that relates to web accessibility. Alt text can be used to include descriptions to pictures, images, and other graphics that would otherwise not be accessible to a blind or visually impaired user who might be using a screen reader to navigate your web site. Besides the obvious moral and legal reasons for wanting to provide basic accessibility accommodations, adding alt text and taking other measures to make your web site more accessible can actually make it better for all of your users. Plus, including alt text can also improve your site’s Search Engine Optimization, since this is additional information that can be collected by web browsers that crawl the various pages of your web site looking for words that match specific search terms.
And even though labeling a photo with alt text might not elicit the same kind of emotional reaction as some poetic song lyric, it doesn’t mean it is any less important in terms of how it helps a blind or visually impaired person to visualize the real world around them.