Hello. I made a curious post about blindness and art a few days ago, and a commenter referred me to your blog, which I found very educational and insightful.
I hope you find my questions respectful, I am very curious as I have never met a blind person before. I understand that blindness is a sort of spectrum, and many blind people still have some level of visual input.
How is your relationship to visual art? If someone describes a painting to you, do you perceive it in a way that's hard to explain to someone with sight? The commenter I mentioned told me that blind people prefer clear, concise descriptions of images/art. When you hear these descriptions, what are you thinking about?
Sorry if this was weird. My whole impetus for this was that it's an innate human feature to seek out and creare beauty, and that everyone's perspective is valuable. I want to understand how all sorts of people witness art, which led me to your blog.
Interesting. I personally think that when it comes to image descriptions done by the artist themself, they can describe e their using whatever language they think is suitable. Other people creating descriptions might describe color or mood, but their image description is going to focus on clarity. They might not know the artist’s full intent, so level of detail might change.
I, like most blind people, can see visual art. Image descriptions are still helpful to me as sometimes I might miss details. Descriptions help fill in the gaps. If I’m unable to look at an image because, for example, I’m listening to my screen-reader read fanfic and an image pops up, the image description can tell me the basic idea of the art. I can picture it in my head. Even totally blind people can sometimes have mental imagery although it depends on the person. There are even fully sighted people who don’t have the ability to picture images in their minds.
