[bksvol-discuss] Re: Describing Pictures In Children's Books

  • From: Grandma Cindy <popularplace@xxxxxxxxx>
  • To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:00:25 -0800 (PST)

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
> 


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