Some background: a good friend of mine is a studio artist, and one time a few years he got invited to be in a show of only collaborative pieces. I write a lot of poetry, so he contacted me about writing something that would then be integrated into the piece. We came up with what we called “flat Braille”, wherein text is translated into Braille (we used a big book on Braille translation from the university library and just translated one letter at a time) and then the pattern of the Braille is painted onto a flat canvas. I wrote a short poem, he did the rest of the painting, and it was actually a pretty big hit at the gallery. It was a one-off using the flat Braille idea, and I’ve only ever thought of it as an innocuous, honestly kind of silly piece.

However, recently some people have said it’s problematic and ableist since it appropriates a system that blind folks use and rely on. One person even said we were making fun of the blind, which honestly shocked me. For years me and my friend had never once thought the piece invited such negativity into the world, but these people were saying it did. I wanted to get a blind person’s perspective on this, and figured Reddit was as good a place as any to try. What do you guys think? Is the painting problematic? If the consensus is yes, we’ll destroy it no question.

Tl;dr: made a painting that involves Braille, was told it’s offensive, wanted to check with people in the blind community.