Book review: Because Pictures Matter published by National Braille Press
Because Pictures Matter: A Guide to Using, Finding, and Creating Tactile Imagery for Blind Children
written by Deborah Kent, illustrated by Ann Cunningham (National Braille Press, 2008)
This book is available for free from NBP in large print format, and is also available in Spanish.
To order, go to
http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/BPM.html
As a former art student, one of the things I find most frustrating about being blind is the attitude on the part of others that how things look is something of which I am uncaring, oblivious, or entirely ignorant.
As human beings, most of us have brains which automatically attempt to find out information, patterns, stories, and even a sense of aesthetics. An aesthetic is, after all, one's sense of what is good and beautiful, what affects each of us emotionally and psychologically and even sometimes physically.
Let me underscore that last bit, because sighted individuals often seem to forget this: beneath all the linguistic and conceptual abstractions of aesthetics lies the fact that we are talking about reacting to what is, after all, the physical world and it's affect upon us.
This is as true of a map as it is of an illustration of how light is broken down into colors as it moves through a prism. It is as true of how a piece of pottery feels in our hand as it is of a diagram explaining how water is transformed from a river into rain and back into a river which runs to the sea.
Pictures and the things which they represent are important to everyone, and blind people are just as capable as sighted people in appreciating the information, beauty, humor, or whatever else is being conveyed through a picture, given the basic concepts and language needed to make sense of what the picture represents.
Some of you are probably wondering why I am even saying all this, it seems so obvious, and I love you for that. Because the reality is that most of the rest of the world still thinks of making visual media accessible to a blind person as a really funny joke. And while most of my friends are geeky enough that they think of the world as one big hands-on experiment, most blind people when they ask "Can I touch that?" are treated as if they just expressed doing something dirty. (I'm going to skip over the lecture about why it is that our culture thinks of vision as pure and touch as dirty.)
These are the sort of attitudes which are discussed in _Because Pictures Matter_, and it is the exploration of these attitudes which take up the majority of the text. There is a very short list of resources which includes a recipe for kitchen clay, but this book is mostly aimed at opening up the minds of parents and teachers who might be resistant to the idea of letting children touch, or may be clueless as to where to begin regarding translating visual media into tactile objects.
Which is not to minimize how important this book is, because it is a very important and very useful little book, one which I wish some of my college professors had had to read.
written by Deborah Kent, illustrated by Ann Cunningham (National Braille Press, 2008)
This book is available for free from NBP in large print format, and is also available in Spanish.
To order, go to
http://www.nbp.org/ic/nbp/BPM.html
As a former art student, one of the things I find most frustrating about being blind is the attitude on the part of others that how things look is something of which I am uncaring, oblivious, or entirely ignorant.
As human beings, most of us have brains which automatically attempt to find out information, patterns, stories, and even a sense of aesthetics. An aesthetic is, after all, one's sense of what is good and beautiful, what affects each of us emotionally and psychologically and even sometimes physically.
Let me underscore that last bit, because sighted individuals often seem to forget this: beneath all the linguistic and conceptual abstractions of aesthetics lies the fact that we are talking about reacting to what is, after all, the physical world and it's affect upon us.
This is as true of a map as it is of an illustration of how light is broken down into colors as it moves through a prism. It is as true of how a piece of pottery feels in our hand as it is of a diagram explaining how water is transformed from a river into rain and back into a river which runs to the sea.
Pictures and the things which they represent are important to everyone, and blind people are just as capable as sighted people in appreciating the information, beauty, humor, or whatever else is being conveyed through a picture, given the basic concepts and language needed to make sense of what the picture represents.
Some of you are probably wondering why I am even saying all this, it seems so obvious, and I love you for that. Because the reality is that most of the rest of the world still thinks of making visual media accessible to a blind person as a really funny joke. And while most of my friends are geeky enough that they think of the world as one big hands-on experiment, most blind people when they ask "Can I touch that?" are treated as if they just expressed doing something dirty. (I'm going to skip over the lecture about why it is that our culture thinks of vision as pure and touch as dirty.)
These are the sort of attitudes which are discussed in _Because Pictures Matter_, and it is the exploration of these attitudes which take up the majority of the text. There is a very short list of resources which includes a recipe for kitchen clay, but this book is mostly aimed at opening up the minds of parents and teachers who might be resistant to the idea of letting children touch, or may be clueless as to where to begin regarding translating visual media into tactile objects.
Which is not to minimize how important this book is, because it is a very important and very useful little book, one which I wish some of my college professors had had to read.