A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

“You should have seen it. There was so much color and the way it was set up was just amazing. There was a – shelf like thing and like – this other area that was just – well like held the color of the side of – it's too hard to explain let me just show you.”

* You then pull out your phone and show a picture of the scene that was so poorly explained and BAM! After seeing the picture it all makes sense. The descriptive holes left by the narrator, fill in with the viewers own descriptions and evaluations now that he has “seen” the picture.

This act has been mimicked by each of us at some point in our lives, if not with a phone with actual snapshots, online pictures or back in the olden days, an actual book.

We sometimes lack the ability to validate what we see in mere words. As for me, I lack that ability with a number of things in my life. I have 10 years of higher education and I still lack the words to describe how I feel or what I see on a daily basis.

My accounts are basic, to say the least. Everything from, “I feel weird” – which we all know is the technical terminology for explaining any situation that isn’t normal in nature, to “I feel off” which is the only way I can describe the feeling of, well, being off or out of sorts.

I don’t have a picture or other means of describing how I feel or what is happening in my body and mind. I have the same problem when faced with the questions, what I actually see? Or how I do specific things? It is so frustrating to lack the ability to describe those processes.

I realized how much I missed my sight and how much I took it for granted, after losing it but what I didn’t realize was how much I would miss being able to describe what I was going through and how much I would miss those thousand word pictures to both fill in the gaps of my descriptions as well as the descriptions of others who try to describe something to me as a blind person.

As soon as we see a picture of whatever we are trying to explain, all of those descriptive deficiencies just magically appear. Which is where the quote “A picture is worth a thousand words” came from.

I have for most of my life envied authors and other writers who can describe things with such detail, or in just the right way as to be able to draw a precise picture of what they are describing in every reader's mind. This is one of the reasons I love to read and also why all readers have their favorite authors.

We all relate to an author who paints that picture with words so well that we feel as readers, we are right there experiencing every smell, sound, and sight as it unfolds right in front of us on the pages.

They do it in such a way that in most cases, it takes way less than a thousand words. They seem to have taken this well-known quote as a personal challenge.

Being as old as I am, (born before Google), I didn’t have the luxury of jumping online and searching for a picture or video that would give my horrific descriptions that much needed boost.

It was up to me to ‘Try’ – that’s the key word here, ‘Try’ to describe what I wished the beneficiary of my verbal picture to see, and believe me I tried.

There were times that these explanations took hours and even days of attempting to get the picture that I saw so vividly in my mind, to magically appear in someone else’s.

Most times, try as I might we both left the conversation unsatisfied and a little empty inside. I can say with total honesty and a lot of shame that there were many discussions where I would just pretend that I understood and could see what someone was telling me just to end the embarrassment and frustration that was building between us.

The sad thing is I still do this when people are trying to describe things to me today. It isn’t because I am blind and can’t see the picture that is worth those thousand words, and it isn’t that the purveyor is apparently lacking the ability to transfer those thousand words to another,  I believe the difficulty lies within us all both as the presenter and the recipient.

As I said before, I envy the writers who have that magical ability to paint a vivid picture with a few well-placed adjectives and metaphors. I am not pointing fingers, I lack this ability also.

Then there are the proverbial hand talkers. Those that must describe the things that are most important to them using only hand gestures. For a visual person, this is a great way to communicate the picture that is most important to the conversation.

Describing a layout, location or design is much more effective if you can use those visual cues that make the story or explanation that much easier to follow.

However, to a blind person, everything gets lost in translation. Let me give you an example:

“The handle comes up about this far, and it has a little nub on the end here so the other half can connect. Then it runs about this far by wire to the little wingy thingy that allows this here side to part the seam of the hub so you can squeeze in like this.”

Makes Perfect Sense – NOT!

Now if you can see the gestures and motions that paired with this conversation it would probably make more sense but to someone that is visually impaired, we’re even more in the dark.

I will admit that when I lost my vision I was afraid that I would never again be able to ‘See’ those thousand words that I so feverishly crave when descriptions run short. In reality, there are ways that those thousand words can be relayed that I never knew existed prior to losing my vision.

The fastest is having the ability to touch. For a blind person, touch is our vision. We rely on the pictures that our minds draw as we feel our way through the darkness.

Feel is actually a very important part of vision for the sighted as well. If I blindfolded you and had you walk barefoot through soft gooey terrain, without sight or any further explanation, is that mushy stuff, pudding, mud or dog shit?

As a quick explanation of how touch works with sight, think about every time we want to inspect something that someone else is holding we say, “Let me see that” where in reality we should say, “Let me hold that” because in reality that is what we actually wish to do.

Videos and movies have also incorporated ‘Audio Descriptive Service’ where every detail of the movie, from the background to the color of clothing is described as the movie plays.

There are more but the core is that pictures are worth a thousand words whether you are sighted or not, the difference being how they are relayed.

– SP