Groan. In the past I've been very detailed in my picture descriptions, including colors, what people are wearing, items and things in the background. We've had quite a discussion about colors in the past, and even people who have been blind since birth say they like to have them. More recently I've been less detailed, but illustrations I've been describing haven't been in children's books. Unfortunately, as a sighted person I have made false assumptions about what people may know and not know if they've never seen, so rather than just stating what something is I've occasionally tried to explain or describe it. I don't know how in how many cases both parents and children are blind; it seems to me that if one of them is sighted that person can describe the pictures to the other, or explain what something is like, comparing it to something perhaps the blind child or parent knows. I try to use fairly sophisticated vocabulary figuring that if someone doesn't know what that is they can look it up in a dictionary and expand their vocabulary, but at times I explain what the word means, too. The one thing that I haven't done, because I feel uncomfortable doing it, is include the ethnicity of the children in the illustrations. I don't feel comfortable describing some children as Black or Asian and not others as Caucasian; I suppose I could describe the ethnicity or every child in every picture, but I've made the decision not to. While it may be politically correct to have an ethnic mix of children in picture books, and that's fine, I prefer to just identify the gender of the child and let the reader/listener use his/her imagination. In none of the books is the ethnicity of the child important to the story. Grandma Cindy --- Monica Willyard <rhyami@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > I've been thinking about how I'm doing some > children's books and am > wondering about something. With the education grant, > we'll have more > young readers soon. How much detail should be put > into describing the > pictures in the books for young readers? I guess I > don't know if young > children will read these books or if blind parents > will be reading these > books to their young children. What I'm thinking is > that my picture > descriptions may end up using words that are more > complicated than the > text, and that might confuse young children who are > learning to read in > Braille. On the other hand, children who are > listening to the books > would understand the descriptions, and I could be > more detailed. I could > use some feedback from those of you who work on > children's books or from > our teachers who are on the list. Thanks for any > help you can offer. > > Monica Willyard > __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com To unsubscribe from this list send a blank Email to bksvol-discuss-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx put the word 'unsubscribe' by itself in the subject line. To get a list of available commands, put the word 'help' by itself in the subject line.