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What Do Blind People Actually See?

nautil.us

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Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?

#111

Post by jes5199 »

furyofantares wrote: post #109
hentrep wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've always wondered how someone born blind is able to wrap their mind around the concept of color. It appears you've done so -- how would you describe color?

I imagine a blind person can study light just as well as anyone else, and can learn about the eye and can understand that sighted people are able to detect both wavelength and intensity differences. Just like a deaf person could learn about pressure waves in the air and how they can be detected by functional ears. But it's probably difficult or impossible to understand what the perception is like, and how rich it is,…

There's a classic essay by Thomas Nagel that makes this exact point in great detail: "What is it like to be a bat" http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf

Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?

#112

Post by kaybe »

sillysaurus3 wrote: post #28
gliese1337 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not blind, but I do occasionally get migraines with visual auras, as do my wife & mother. Exactly once in my life that I recall, I had a migraine that caused total perceptual blindness (oddly, this has also happened exactly once to my wife, before we knew each other). It's extremely odd- one's visual field (at least in our cases) steadily contracts, until there's just nothing left. It's not an annulus of darknes…

It's extremely odd- one's visual field (at least in our cases) steadily contracts, until there's just nothing left. It's not an annulus of darkness closing in, it's juts nothing- the field you can see is smaller, and there's still nothing outside of it, just like there always isn't. This is the first time I've heard of anyone else experiencing this phenomenon besides myself. Have there ever been any long-term effects…

For me this is a symtom of heat stroke, usually the first I notice.

Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?

#113

Post by kaybe »

eru wrote: post #4

I still want that vibrating compass belt.

I still want to try to glue a magnet to my finger. It is possible to get implants, but that's scary. Being able to feel magnetic fields must be awesome!

(http://gizmodo.com/5895555/i-have-a-magnet-implant-in-my-fin...

http://io9.com/what-you-need-to-know-about-getting-magnetic-...)

Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?

#114

Post by stevenrace »

bramd wrote: post #104
eranation wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've been totally blind since birth. Please forgive me for the naive question, I'm probably full of misconceptions about blindness, but out of pure curiosity, how do you read and write so well without seeing? Is the technology so advanced today? Are you using a screen reader and a regular keyboard? (e.g. typing and than playing it via the reader) how do you know if you made a typo? (e.g. who's and whose sound the s…

I'm not a native English speaker either. > Is the technology so advanced today? Are you using a screen reader and a regular keyboard? (e.g. typing and than playing it via the reader) how do you know if you made a typo? (e.g. who's and whose sound the same) Yes, I'm using a regular keyboard and a screenreader. Besides speech output I use a device called a refreshable braille display which can display up to 40 or 80 ch…

Fascinating, thanks.

At what speed do you replay text->audio (ie realtime, 1.5x,2x,...)?

Lastly, if you disregard price is the braille 'refreshable display' a better experience?

Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?

#115

Post by rsfinn »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #108
sillysaurus3 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for the info. May I ask, which disease?

Intracranial hypertension.

Hey, I had that about twenty years ago. The only symptom I had was that I would wake up with a headache for no apparent reason (not a migraine, but frequently nausea-inducing).

My ophthalmologist detected it during a regular examination and sent out for MRI/CAT scan/spinal tap to rule out everything else, then put me on a regimen of -- oh, now I can't remember; the medicine used for altitude sickness (diamox?) and eventually "cured" me; I haven't had a recurrence since.

I guess my point is that the grandparent poster should consider seeing an ophthalmologist and/or a neurologist at their earliest convenience. (My doctor was pleased that he'd "caught it in time"; he spoke of another patient in which it had not been detected quickly enough and that person had gone blind.)

Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?

#116

Post by bramd »

stevenrace wrote: post #114
bramd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a native English speaker either. > Is the technology so advanced today? Are you using a screen reader and a regular keyboard? (e.g. typing and than playing it via the reader) how do you know if you made a typo? (e.g. who's and whose sound the same) Yes, I'm using a regular keyboard and a screenreader. Besides speech output I use a device called a refreshable braille display which can display up to 40 or 80 ch…

Fascinating, thanks. At what speed do you replay text->audio (ie realtime, 1.5x,2x,...)? Lastly, if you disregard price is the braille 'refreshable display' a better experience?

> At what speed do you replay text->audio (ie realtime, 1.5x,2x,...)?

Approximately the speed that the guy at the beginning of this video uses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=92pM6hJG6Wo

> Lastly, if you disregard price is the braille 'refreshable display' a better experience?

It just what you're used to I guess, I know lots of people who can get by without one. I especially like it when doing coding and doing stuff in a terminal. Easier to see indentation, parenthesis, quotes etc.

Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?

#117

Post by bramd »

eranation wrote: post #106
bramd wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a native English speaker either. > Is the technology so advanced today? Are you using a screen reader and a regular keyboard? (e.g. typing and than playing it via the reader) how do you know if you made a typo? (e.g. who's and whose sound the same) Yes, I'm using a regular keyboard and a screenreader. Besides speech output I use a device called a refreshable braille display which can display up to 40 or 80 ch…

This is awesome, thanks for the reply! p.s. are there IDEA / Eclipse plugins that support accessibility?

You mean making the IDE itself accessible? Eclipse is already quite accessible out of the box.

Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?

#118

Post by leoc »

bramd wrote: post #105
leoc wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sensory substitution, aka how to replace input from one sense with input from another is a quite interesting topic. Indeed! Have you ever tried something like the vOICe http://www.seeingwithsound.com/ ?

> Have you ever tried something like the vOICe http://www.seeingwithsound.com/ ? Yes, I have played with it. However, I'm not convinced yet if I should invest a lot of time learning it. Another useful and interesting skill is echolocation[0]. I have used that since Iwas a child to survey my environment. 0: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_echolocation

I seem to recall research claming that vOICe users already had very impressive results after 50-100 hours of use/training, so I would guess that it's worth the time.

Human echolocation is absolutely balling, what else can I say?

Re: What Do Blind People Actually See?

#119

Post by V-2 »

ygra wrote: post #93
V-2 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I once read about a blind guy who got his eyesight - thanks to a surgery - after a life-long blindness of about 30 years. He did see, but couldn't process visual information like a normal person (eg. he would only recognize a human face to be a human face after the person began talking)

I wonder whether that changes over time. After all, people with eyesight have to learn that as well, I guess. They just do it at the beginning of their life.

Yes they learn, but the opportunity might be a one off for all we know.

Not the same, but similar:

According to the Nobel Prize-winning research from David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel in the 1960s, the brain may only have a short window of opportunity in which to develop binocular vision, in which both eyes are used together. Their studies in cats, and many other studies since, suggest that if the developing brain isn’t exposed to overlapping images from the two eyes, it will never form the connections it needs to process a three dimensional scene

See the entire article: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120719-awoken-from-a-2d-wo...

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