On visual impairment and inclusion

 

As a visually impaired person, most of my life has been spent performing a sighted habitus to pass as fully abled. To have a job, mainly, and just generally to be accepted and heard beyond stereotypes. Things like stopping to look at store window displays or people-watching from a café terrasse are not among the activities I naturally enjoy when I go out. Instead, my attention goes to navigating safely - not walking into anyone on my fully blind side, or being decapitated by a scaffolding or street sign, or mangled by a scooter or a bicycle at an intersection. An outing without any brush with injury always feels like a small victory. As I enter my building after a stroll, I am grateful to my attentive capacity and to higher powers for getting me back home safely once again. 

I think of people who are fully blind, or who are experiencing other disabilities, and about how much more challenging navigating the world alone must be for them. A few weeks ago, for example, I helped a fully blind man untangle himself from a postcard stand, left out on the sidewalk by the papeterie. I couldn't help but contemplate how the wiry mess of shiny, flimsy paper-plastics, devoid of any sensorial quality or texture, imposing itself through a confusing structure only designed for certain people, was the perfect metaphor for the visual primacy implicit in our societies. 

Until recently, as the peripheral vision of my remaining monocular sight has begun to deteriorate, I was unaware of the way visual primacy is also imposed through driving laws. For example, in my city, cyclists can drive against traffic on one-way streets with a speed limit of 30km/hr or less. The consequence of this for someone who primarily sees through central vision and through hearing is the constant requirement to turn fully and check both ways before crossing the street. That sounds fair enough, except that the small streets of old city centers usually need to be criss-crossed dozens of times since the sidewalk is only wide enough for one person (and that is only if it has not been blocked by a bicycle or garbage can). 

Even with the greatest care, on two occasions in the past few months I have been sideswiped by proud cyclists who could not understand why I was walking in the street, even though the street visibly lacked a sidewalk at all. "Faites attention!" they both screeched as they whizzed by, in a hurry to get wherever they were going. It never occurred to either of these people that they themselves could be more careful by simply slowing down. After all, what if they were the visually impaired ones (do not visually impaired people enjoy cycling too)? Their speed meant that my safety depended on their full sight - on their so-called ability - rather than on their wider attentive capacity. 

Which brings me to the question of, not only how to make more accessible roads and cities (which is urgent and important), but also, how to educate to less disabling societies. In a disabling society, the price to pay for inclusion is often nothing less than the betrayal of one's embodied ways of being and knowing, which, to legitimate the epistemicide, must become (and we are educated to this) less than. What would it take for my being in the fragility of being - essentially, in the words of Merleau-Ponty, for my being a body in the body of the world - to coexist safely with others' needs to be above or to be more than - through more speed, more power?

Certainly technology can help, if it recognizes and appreciates my way of being as equal to other faster, more powerful ways. Like many visually impaired people, I have a lot of hope in technology. But being a product of culture, a human technology can only come to be if we begin to take seriously and to educate to the many ways of being and knowing in the embodied, sensory-rich, spacious present.