Unceasing Echoes

eyesight offers people a lot of techniques, options and choices that blind people don’t have for managing how (or if) they acknowledge each other in unplanned encounters – when spotting someone on the street, in a crowd even at a party or event etc. Most of the options lie between the polarities of a full conversation (on the one hand) and the decision to ignore each other (on the other).   As I understand it, for a sighted person on recognising someone, there are fleeting moments of decision-making, of uncertainty about whether to acknowledge each other or not, checking out whether it might be only you who have spotted them, and if so, in that instant, the choice to make contact lies entirely with you. Alternatively, there will be situations where it is a pleasure to bump into someone where you wouldn’t but make every effort to catch up with them whether they’ve seen you or not.   I’m describing situations here that I only understand vicariously and that while I know the language and

There’s something unbelievable, even verging on the magical  for me  about the idea that most people have the ability to catch someone else’s eye, draw, hold or avoid their gaze, lock eyes, stare someone down through this thing called Eye contact. It  can convey desire, longing, irritation, encouragement, questioning, support, pleading, anger, hatred, love, sadness, confidence, control, threat, contempt or anxiety ; it can be the vehicle for messages to ‘stop’, that it’s time to leave, communicate the desire for a drink, request to be rescued from a bore or harasser In a party…   Without direct experience, I only have some limited understanding of how  people can communicate so much through their eyes and over a distance. I am therefore regularly surprised at the sheer extent and power that the eye and particularly eye contact apparently have in so much human communication – a facility that I have no access to. You’d think that it is a wonder that blind people are able to communicate w

Sitting in a café years ago, I  realised how, despite always being aware of voices, they excite and intrigue me - each of them a stranger yet compelling. It made me reflect how much my world is constructed from voices. How much I rely upon them to tell me about somebody, to create an impression, a picture of them.   vacuous piercing outbursts of laughter, speaking much louder than is necessary, arrogant, stiff, smooth and prickly voices, alluring, miserable, embittered, confident, sullen, content, board, thoughtful, over-effusive, understated and dynamic ones.   Just as sighted people make significant judgements about others based upon their appearance - making connections or avoiding them upon this basis – blind people do exactly the same with voices. How a voice can seduce or turn off, convey beauty or disgust, how you can fall in love with a voice and imagine flying away together with its owner for ever. How voices suggest trust-worthiness or dishonesty, tension, or coldness, shallo

Have you noticed that uncanny way how, in situations where people are gathered in small groups or couples in conversation ( cafes, pubs, restaurants etc)  the words or even phrases from one conversation will seem to be replayed by others, as if themes are unwittingly echoing around the room?  I don’t imagine that they can all possibly be listening to, or even clearly hearing  one another, but somehow, they do hear enough for the word or phrase to enter their thoughts and be spoken and integrated as part of their own conversation.    

Them: “Are you blind then mate?” “I’d be completely blind without my glasses, can’t see anythink without them. Haven’t you thought about getting yourself some glasses?”   Me: “Well, I can’t see enough to wear glasses”   Them: “No mate, you should get some. I can’t see anythink without mine. Just saying”.    

I’ve posted here before about how often I encounter a preoccupation with my blindness and particularly the need to ‘know’ details about my eyesight before moving on to a proper conversation, working together, providing me with directions to a shop or whatever. People often want to know the name of my eye condition, but most often, it is ‘how much’ I can see that interests them most. Their belief must be that somehow, if they knew the facts, if I would only give them a name and a number, they would then be able to move on enough to be able to deal with me and speak to me about other things.   Implicit in the questions is an assumption that I know all about the clinical diagnosis, am interested in it and that I could describe ‘how much’ I can see. The truth of the matter is that I have no idea ‘how much I can see’. The very question implies a comparison, and generally requires me to be able to provide a relative comparison with ‘normal’ sight. I really have no idea how to describe ‘how m

In yesterday’s post giving information to new readers about the background to this blog, I recalled how the blog platform that I’d previously used in 2007 had been updated with ‘improvements’ for sighted users but had become much more confusing and unfathomable (if not completely technically inaccessible) for me to use with screen-reading software. I consequently lost control over my own blog and let it go.   This led me to remember numerous times that perfectly accessible and hitherto well designed websites and (more recently) smartphone apps have undergone updates that while apparently making improvements for sighted users, have either made them less usable or completely inaccessible for blind people.   There have been so many times when a website or phone app have become integral to my home or working life and suddenly, overnight the update has meant that an aspect of my life has temporarily ceased while I find work-arounds, new ways of doing things or adaptations. Sometimes there h

I have noticed an increase over the last ten years or so in the number of people that I come across who don’t appear to understand the meaning of a white stick. I heard a blind woman on a radio phone-in recently talking about her experience of how her requests for assistance from passers-by, shop-keepers etc, were increasingly ignored and despite using a white stick, its connection with her limited eyesight was often not understood. This is my experience too, as again, when asking strangers for assistance on the street, despite using a white stick, I frequently have to explain that I’m asking because I am blind, the response being “sorry, I didn’t realise”.   It seems then that, despite its importance both as an essential  navigation  aid and as a way to let others know that someone is blind, the white stick is no longer the universally understood symbol of blindness. The comment “what’s he got that stick for Mummy?” could just as easily come from a 35 year old as a five year old now.

sFrom time to time, I try to remember to provide an explanation of what the blog is for anyone who comes upon it in mid flow. So, for anyone new to reading my blog, welcome. I hope that you’ll look back at the previous posts over the months.     This blog really began with an earlier one  that I wrote for a while in 2007 called Sitelines . The blog platform that I’d chosen unfortunately became less accessible to use and  what had been a straightforward fast process of writing, editing and posting, became an uncertain and  laborious set of actions – I’d lost control of it. Consequently my posting stopped.   I found my notes about that old blog in January and enjoyed reading it. I was particularly struck that the issues that I’d  encountered then (13 years ago) hadn’t changed, leading  me to wonder how much has really changed over my life in terms of attitudes to and thinking about blindness and disability. So I started this blog.   I have written more this time with over 30 posts so far

As the number of cars on the roads increases, our often narrow residential streets become busier and more and to protect their vehicles, more drivers park their cars on the pavements. I live in a densely populated residential area with far too high vehicle ownership per household. While some narrower streets attract more pavement parking than the wider ones, I notice that even on these streets, some drivers park with just a wheel on the pavement while others have half of their vehicle’s width over it. Similarly, there are perfectly wide streets where most vehicles park on the road yet some owners park on the pavement. I do understand that many people rely on their car or van and want to protect it from being knocked by careless drivers on narrow streets.   From the vantage point of a non-driver who gets a lot of helpful mileage out of my partner and friends’ cars, I see vehicle ownership as a privilege and there should be no entitlement to parking spaces close to home for people other

I’m struck by how much the lockdown and social distancing is impacting on me and like most people, it’s become a bit of a preoccupation.   An earlier post, which  started to raise the question of how important it is to be able to see people in order to have an authentic conversation with them , triggered some interesting conversations. The post related specifically to the current use of video conferencing/’chat’ platforms  for meetings and social gatherings, but it has raised important questions (for me at least) about the apparent general acceptance of the supremacy of video over audio.   It feels a bit strange hearing these arguments for video when it was only until relatively recently that we managed perfectly well conducting (or supporting) everything from our friendships and closest relationships, to highly detailed work, to crisis interventions and suicide prevention on the (audio only) phone.   The writer and journalist Malcolm Gladwell, in his latest book ‘Danger and strangers:

In my earlier post with this title, I described the irritating and diminishing way that so many people still assume that all the blind (or Black, Asian, gay etc) people in a city know each other.   I’ve always found it hard to  know what to say in response, when someone trying to be friendly says: “We’ve got a blind chap at work, I bet you know him… He’s a right laugh, lovely dog (it sings the national anthem, really, well not with words obviously’”   I always run a set of internal replies posing challenges, offering curt rebuffs, explaining why it is unlikely that I might know the person in question… but never feeling entirely  comfortable about how to say it.   After all these years, I have the answer. It’s so obvious:     Him. “We’ve got a blind chap at work, I bet you know him… He’s a right laugh, lovely dog (it sings the national anthem, really, well not with words obviously’”   Me. “We’ve got a guy at work, complete twat, you must know him”.  

It  seems that, in video chats and meetings, to hear someone’s voice clearly is less important than being  able to see them.   I am irritated at the amount of the time on video conferencing that is taken up with whether people’s video is working or not, that it’s ‘freezing’... While  I want to tell people to move closer to the microphone to stop their voices continually breaking up, or to talk more quietly to stop them distorting … but I stay silent because I know it draws a kind of attention that feels different from the video talk.   I yearn to hear people’s voices clearly and with good audio quality while most others only seem to want to be able to see them.   Such a different world I inhabit.