Comments on: Writing Blind, a Creative Force

By: Prabha Salimath.

Prabha Salimath. — Wed, 09 Oct 2013 15:30:16 +0000

Dr.Hannah you’re just an inspiration even to those who has perfect sight,, bcoz sometimes we ignore things before getting its detail shame on us.
But you always do everything with detail so as excellent work will be sure output..

By: Ruth Lehrer

Ruth Lehrer — Tue, 08 Oct 2013 14:41:50 +0000

In the 80s I was a certified Braille transcriber — A book maker! It was back in the time where we were just on the edge of computerizing everything but not quite there yet. I had a group of volunteer transcribers who, page by page, transcribed text by hand using Perkins braillewriters. I’m sure this is where my proofreading skills came from–each page had to be perfect.

There was a quote that I always liked, despite its sappiness. It is attributed to Jim Fiebig (not sure who he was). “There is a wonder in reading Braille that the sighted will never know: to touch words and have them touch you back.”

When I started meeting people in the Deaf-Blind community, this had even more meaning to me.

By: Patricia Kristensen

Patricia Kristensen — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 03:55:57 +0000

Thank you for sharing this post and your experiences writing with partial blindness. It has given me something to think about and a different perspective on the writing process. What I found most interesting is that when I considered your perspective I concluded that indeed as a sighted person, I can at times be blind to important detail. I will now pay closer attention. I am also a little jealous that you can still work with your cat sitting between you and the computer screen.

By: silver price

silver price — Wed, 10 Jul 2013 16:21:27 +0000

I have been partially blind since birth but it is only since I started writing blog posts that I have understood the extent to which my blindness influences the way I write. When I was a postgraduate student a careless comment by a professor about my powerful reading glasses made me realise that my partial blindness dictates not only how I read but also, more significantly, the thoughts I have about my reading matter. When I read print, the amount of magnification I need means that I cannot skim read. I read word by word and so I have always tended to focus on a text’s details rather than its bigger picture. At first this revelation upset me: I had spent years trying to downplay my blindness, trying to function as a sighted person, and so it was both infuriating and disheartening to find out that others were quick to make what I saw as a reductive association between my sight and my work.

By: Emily Michael

Emily Michael — Tue, 02 Jul 2013 01:42:15 +0000

Hannah, you articulate an approach to reading and writing that resonates with me. As a fellow blind blogger and as a teacher of writing, I find each day’s literary activities shaped by my own blind perspective.

You mentioned that, because of your vision, you favor short sentences. This reminds me of my own endeavors in writing braille poetry. Because the braille line is so much shorter than the print line, only holding about 40 characters, the poet who writes in braille must creatively manipulate line breaks. But as you know, in braille, one word can be represented by a single character, and this lends a different poetic effect to the words produced.

I rely heavily on text-to-speech software for editing my own work. While this technology seems a natural recourse for blind people, it is by no means a “blindness only” technology. As I encourage my students to read their own work aloud, I often find myself telling them how to activate the text-to-speech functions on their own computers. A text-to-speech program is much less forgiving than the self-correcting effort of the writer who reads her own work aloud! In this case, the perspective offered by my blindness – the tools I MUST use – suggests an unexpected and helpful measure to my sighted students.