Making my first attempt to completely reframe a narrative:

#Blindness or #VisualImpairment is not a #disability. Rather, it is a #disperception. Imagine yourself blindfolded, put on an airplane and dropped off in a foreign land where no one speaks your #language and all the signs are in an #alphabet you have never seen. . You of course would not be able to #experience the world around you in any meaningful way without an #interpreter or a #translator. You have no disability, only a disperception, as you cannot perceive the language or the printed alphabet they are using in a meaningful way. By the same definition and the same experiences, #accessibility as it relates to blindness or vision impairment is not an #accommodation for a disability; it is instead a #translation into the #perception we can experience.

What is a #screenReader? It is simply an interpreter that takes what it finds on a device screen that we cannot see and translates it to speech, a sound that we can hear, or braille, an alphabet pattern that we can feel.

What is #Braille? Why it's nothing more than a translated alphabet that we feel rather than seeing.

What is accessibility? It's nothing more than being sure that your app, website, device, building, whatever, can reliably interpret or translate its visual cues that we cannot perceive into auditory, tactile and haptic cues that we can perceive, usually using a translation matrix that we already have available, although providing such a translation matrix can help in some cases as well.

Another aspect is navigation, where we use various methods of translation to take what would normally be visual cues from vehicles, buildings, etc and translate them to sensations that we can perceive. Still, this is simply translation, it in no way affects our ability to navigate in an environment; it is simply a translation matrix similar to a screen reader, even if it's low-tech like the staff we carry. Yes, I call it my staff, because a new friend and coworker called it that and I love it. I've got everyone at work calling it that now. Although I don't mind cane or stick or whatever, staff is my favorite word for this handy translation tool that has saved my life on more than one occasion, although it still doesn't protect my head, which I actually find more important than protecting me from the waste down. GPS is another handy translation tool, as it generally uses voice cues, and can be helped along with the aid of the screen reader, to tell us where we are, and in many cases, what is around us. The point is that these things are all translation tools, nothing more, nothing less. They translate visual cues into audible and/or tactile cues that we are able to perceive meaningfully, with or without instruction from others.

Once again, for the people in the back, I do not have a disability, which is defined as an inability to perform actions. I have a disperception, meaning that I have different experiences based on the fact that I cannot perceive visual cues, and need a translator that will take those visual cues and translate them into the #auditory and #tactile perceptions I do have.