The blind leading the sighted
I used to work with a colleague who was blind since birth. He told a story about how he diagnosed text "missing" from a webpage when his sighted coworkers could not troubleshoot the problem.
How could he tell? His text "screen reader" showed the words and the color attributes as separate objects. Turns out they had white text on a white background. Because he wasn't "seeing" the text as a sighted reader would, he was able to "look" at the problem from a different perspective.
Talk about the blind leading the sighted.
How could he tell? His text "screen reader" showed the words and the color attributes as separate objects. Turns out they had white text on a white background. Because he wasn't "seeing" the text as a sighted reader would, he was able to "look" at the problem from a different perspective.
Talk about the blind leading the sighted.
posted by The Sarcasticynic | 1/23/2007 05:19:00 PM
2 Comments:
That is a really cool story. Indirectly it reminds me of a 60 Minutes segment from Sunday night in which a savant in the UK explained his off-the-charts math & numbers genius by saying when he looks at a sequence of numbers he is able to decipher them because his brain "re-writes" the numbers into a landscape of colors. He might see 1,264 as a squiggle of blue, red, green, and yellow.
To fully appreciate the range of human perception, sometimes we need to ask those with a different perspective.
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