The Table Is Not What You See

I believe my personal Roman Empire Meme is this anecdote our professor told us during practical classes on one of my last semesters at the university.

But first, some background.

When the time came for me to choose my specialty for my Master’s Thesis, I admit I wasn’t the most ambitious — I wanted something not too technical. One of the most interesting specialties I could take was English for the Blind, led by an incredibly charismatic elderly professor, an absolutely passionate yet tad chaotic man who would disappear for months at a time, then come back and announce he just spontaneously went to Nepal for an adventure and forgot to tell anyone. Then we would spend the rest of our semester listening to him talk about waking up to the sunrise over the Himalayas and how he made impaired and impoverished children cry from joy, because he was buying them simple cellphones and teaching them how to use those.

There was this one anecdote he told that absolutely blew my mind and paved the way for the subject of my Master’s Thesis. I’m going to be paraphrasing it a lot, as it’s been a while:

Whenever you think of a picture of a table, what do you have in mind? Most people will probably think of something simple, similar to that of a Pi symbol.

something like this

But this is not a table. It’s a largely symbolic representation of a table that’s shown from an extremely simplified perspective. If you were to try and recreate that image in real life, you’d have to squat at a very specific angle to be able to see only the edge of it and conceal the other two legs. Now that I think about it, this perspective might actually be impossible.

Now imagine how would you draw a table for a person who was born blind? Would it be any different? First and foremost, you have to discard perspective altogether, because most of the congenitally blind have no concept of it. The closest we ever got for a congenitally blind child to understand perspective, was when he said, “Oh, so it’s kind of like predicting the future”.

People who have no concept of sight navigate using other senses, mostly by touch. So a table drawing that would be more comprehensible to a person blind from birth, would look like this:

You can make an experiment for yourself: grab a table in your house, close your eyes and only examine it with your hands. Table edge, edge, edge… leg. Sharp curve. Edge, edge, edge… leg. Sharp curve again. Repeat. It all makes sense if you discard your own point of view.

Understanding that for some people perspective doesn’t exist, that colors don’t exist, and that space is strictly connected to time, as opposed to spatial dimensions, overturned my whole view on the world. Now every time I encounter someone whose ideas are completely different from my own, who maybe doesn’t understand or like the same things that I do, I think of the table. And always when I teach or translate, I need to have the table in mind. It’s not always easy, and admittedly I do sometimes fail, jumping into shortcuts based on my knowledge bias. Or sometimes just panic shortcuts it for me — gotta love the neurospicy brain.

When I announced to my then bf that I will be writing my Master’s Thesis on the subject of tactile graphics and failed efforts for able-bodied people to understand the congenitally blind people’s world, he groaned:

“Well, that’s perfect, you’re great at pointing out other people’s mistakes and being b^%chy about it.”

I guess I am. After all, I made a career out of it.

I think our world would be a bit better if we thought of the table before assuming things about other people.