[bksvol-discuss] Re: Describing Pictures In Children's Books
- From: Ann Parsons <akp@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:10:51 -0500
Hi all,
Grandma, I think you're doing just fine. For children and adults who
are blind, and especially for those of us who were born blind,
descriptions of pictures should be as detailed as you want to make
them. Use color. This is a good learning experience for kids because
they have to know about color. They have to be able to understand the
meaning, the intellectual meaning of blue or purple or yellow. they
also need to understand, in simple terms about perspective, that things
look smaller if they are farther away, much as a sound is fainter if it
is far away. They need to understand the difference between background
and foreground too. Like a person may be the main feature of a
picture, but that person is standing on a beach, back to the ocean, and so on.
As for not mentioning the ethnicity of the children in the pictures,
Grandma, that's like saying you won't tell a kid that there's a brown
or a black or a pokadotted dog in a picture. A sighted kid is going to
see an Afro-American kid and is going to recognize the ethnicity. He
is going to see a blond girl with blue eyes, or a Chinese boy with
almond shaped eyes and the slant that they have. Sighted kids see this
and they are taught to recognize what they see. It is part of the
identification process. Think you may be confusing description with
value judgments. You can say, I see three Afro-American people walking
up the street. There is a mother, a father and a little girl in a
bright pink dress. That places no value judgment on what you see at
all, it's just description. If, on the other hand you added an
evaluation to the description, e.g. that blond man looks nice. That
dark man looks bad. Then, you'd have a problem. Data is data. What
the human mind does with that data is its problem.
<smiling> Now, if you're blind and you don't have a describer handy,
you can really get yourself into trouble. Here's a graphic example.
Our Secretary of State is Condoleezza Rice. Well, I heard the name, I
must have read it in the online newspapers, but I invisioned a tall,
Scandinavian looking person with long blond hair and so on. I only
found out a couple of years ago that Condoleezza Rice is Afro-American.
I was totally blown away! I mean, I was completely surprised. So, if
you think that alerting kids to what ethnicity the children in the
pictures are doesn't matter, it does. So, just describe. Don't
evaluate, just describe. You'll do just fine!
Ann P.
--
Ann K. Parsons
Portal Tutoring
EMAIL: akp@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.portaltutoring.info
"All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost."
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