It's beyond beautiful. I don't think someone born blind will ever truly understand it. But I'm sure they recognize how unaccessible the world is

I’m not completely blind, but I am legally blind. I have no concept of 20/20 vision. I don’t understand how you can go from reading a sign 100 feet away to then looking down at a news paper and being able to read that too. Is it like this too...? You just... can?

Interesting analogy. I myself am fully blind, apart from what is known as light perception, and that fills in a little bit of it for me.

I can tell that something is either further away from me or closer together. Not because it gets larger, but because the light is less severely blocked as it were. And I couldn't really explain that easily to a sighted person.

In fact, I was talking to a researcher doing research into geometry for blind learners, and we went into some really interesting things that I never really thought about before. I was, for example, asked when I learned about the concept of sides to an object, and that the back side of an object is invisible if you look at it from right in front of it because the front, if you will, is in the way. Those were conclusions I had already come to subconsciously, but it makes it clear how we develop radically differently from one another where that is concerned. I don't recall ever consciously making that distinction, because that is not how I look at things. My hands don't have that limitation and need to essentially run across an object to discern it's meaning, which often contains multiple sides of a thing by default.

What is interesting to me is that sight , in this thread, seems a bit like the great equalizer. If one does not have sight, then one is somehow lesser, and to not know sight is to be somehow diminished. Not as fully cognizant of reality as our sight-capable counterparts.

I would disagree. Depending primarily on one sense in order to function is about as insensible as depending on any one of anything. If you cease to be able to function when that one thing is taken away, you introduce a single point of failure.

Just like you cannot explain entirely the concept of sight to me, similarly can I not explain to you how sounds , even the slightest rustle of clothing, can tell story about one's surroundings. That the way sounds bounce off materials can tell me where a table in a room is, how high that room is, if there is carpet in the room. That a louder sound can tell me the presence of a building across a wide street. Or how a voice can tell the attentive listener if you're lying, if you're sad and if you're hesitant, even if your face betrays nothing.

Sight is useful, I will certainly not dispute that. But sight has also become a crutch, the measure life is measured by in a lot of respects. And this error in judgement often leads to accessibility discussions running into the ground.

Just going to say that only about 10 to 15% of legally blind individuals truly can't see anything at all. Most people have some kind of light perception or usable vision

It’s helpful to make analogies to sound if you can.