Re: Your choice? Would you restore your vision?
@@73: I feel like there are two parts to the social model that you describe. One of these is purely social / not well thought out by the sighted majority, and the other is based around the absurd overpowered nature of vision compared to the other senses, making it impractical to design things any other way until we can afford to. (When any particular society could afford to move away from a monosensic structure is a vast a complex subject, and some would argue that progress and opportunity for safe progress overlap almost completely. I'm not sure I'd agree (why is Braille so young? How old are canes, seeing as that whole "blind leading the blind" parable only makes sense without them being common, but I'd think that using a big stick to extend one's awareness to be a concept that predates civilization ...' ). Which is to say, it'd take up a whole thread and a thesis or three.)
I think I weighted that poorly. Suffice it to say, there are two separate parts to the social / cultural / worldbuilding situation, and disentangling where one begins and the other ends, and when a failure in the resource-based one is or is not acceptable, is going to lead to lots of differing opinions.
But I do feel like the three biggest downsides to blindness (other than being left out of video games) are people, the increased difficulty accessing books and written data, and being in a world built under the assumption that only people who can drive are considered worth building anything but daycares and prisons for.
One of those is purely people being ignorant and/or needlessly unpleasant. The other two come from practical resource allocation concerns that I'm not sure could have turned out any differently without making life harder unnecessarily for everyone else. Maybe push building car-based infrastructure back a century, but then would the tech that gets around the problems with cars have developed without drivers being able to go basically anywhere at anytime? And a tactile form of writing is outcompeted by ink and paper quite handily, seeing as tactile forms of writing did exist (where are all the blind Cuneiform experts?). If we can posit a world where cars did not reduce accessibility of travel, it's much harder to come up with a way that books could have been accessible between the invention of affordable writing materials and the production of enough resources to make alternatives practical.
Computer accessibility, though ... -_-
I feel like I keep trying to be more balanced, and instead keep coming back to the "how could we expect otherwise without reducing scarcity"; stuff. Presumptive design is far more troublesome on a daily basis. I mean, who thought puting an inaccessible CAPCHA on an email service after decades was a good idea? Someone who read "I'm blind" in my support ticket and took it as meaning "I couldn't read that one, and only that one". ... Ugh, how much clearer could I be? "I'm blind" means "I cannot see", not "lol I that looks weird im so blind roflmao". >.<
(And that is why I stopped answering forum emails. F***ing CAPCHAs.)
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