Why we're doing it
To a blind or low-vision braille reader, the braille-coated streetfront window presents as a series of textual 'reflections' on the life of the street, real or imagined; to a sighted person, the braille is an indecipherable but alluringly tactile script on the surface of the glass. In rendering the window's transparent and reflective qualities 'visible' to a blind touch-reader, it becomes largely invisible to a sighted person. The BWP thus raises intriguing questions about language, perception and cognition; but its concerns don't end there.
This project ushers people who are blind into higher visibility in the public arena in a new way, not merely because they are trying to navigate through the city by the shortest and safest route. It creates a fragile bridge - a temporary privileging of 'other' perceptions in an environment saturated with visual information. People who are blind represent difference and diversity rarely seen or engaged with in public because the public domain has so few accommodations and amenities that are fully accessible. The sighted community generally tries to stay out of the way of a blind person they see coming towards them on the street. One blind person describes this phenomenon as "so many unidentified breezes" brushing against her skin. She wants to call out: 'Don't just be a breeze passing by me'.
The presence of braille and braille readers on a busy city street invites acts of translation and social interactions across 'difference', bridging the gap between blind and sighted people and inverting the usual hierarchy that privileges sight. In particular, it facilitates genuine human exchanges about the issue of blind people's exclusion from so many aspects of the wider culture of which they are a part. The workshops and the publication of the braille text on a high-visibility window, remind the larger community of the presence of blind people in their midst and the vital importance of braille as a key to their literacy and the very ordinary advantages and privileges that flow from that. It goes further however, by embodying the aesthetic potential of braille and the creative possibilities it offers its readers across a wide range of contemporary art genres.
Braille literacy is now being compromised by synthetic speech which offers a relatively inexpensive and fast form of access to information for people who are blind or with low vision; but listening to text is not the same experience as reading text and never will be. Reading is a solitary experience in which the reader brings their inner voice, imagination and subjective experience to the performance of the text, providing their own sense of rhythm, tempo, cadence, tonality, intervals and, importantly, silence. Each reading is, to some extent, a re-writing.
At this juncture in the communications revolution, there is a pressing need to reflect publicly on the unique qualities of braille and braille reading, which cannot be replicated by any other means. In the writing workshops, on the window, in the streets and in media coverage, The Braille Window Project fosters community discussion of this critical issue. It is an issue which has implications for all readers as we become more estranged from the form and materiality of print on paper and more embedded within, and dependent upon, proliferating webs of electronic information and communication.
