The eyes have it. Or they don't.

Subject: The eyes have it. Or they don't.
From: Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 18 May 2004 14:27:39 -0400


Sometimes I see something the way I see it, and I cannot fathom how anyone else sees it differently. I'm not proud of this, mind you; because I like to think that most of the time I can see the other person's viewpoint and work toward a common understanding.

But I've never been able to throttle down the visual part of my brain to the point that I see only the _content_ of a passage I'm reading. Apparently, to judge from the writings of several posters in recent threads, there are a lot of people who see nothing but ideas when they read a page of type and are not only oblivious to the subtleties of font selection but are equally unseeing when it comes to gross page layout, spelling and punctuation, word choice, style, agreement of subject and verb, or anything else. In fact, these individuals seem to be able to channel the writer's very thoughts and understand the meaning of what appears to me to be ambiguous gibberish at best.

I've tried and tried, but I can't get my brain to work that way. I see a page as an integrated whole made up of visual and verbal elements that either complement each other (making the message clearer to me) or conflict with each other (making it more confusing). Obviously, the way I look at a page is as incomprehensible to content channelers as theirs is to me.

That's not to say I'm looking for a WYSIWYG XML editor, because I'm not. I'm perfectly content to design html pages in Notepad and to type marked up content into a database table, and I can visualize it well enough, thanks, with just a few eyeball checks along the way to ensure that I didn't miscode some text. And it's not a problem for me to switch between visual markup and structural markup, depending on the context where I'm working. I'm just saying that this is yet another example of folks talking past each other. We've got the I-don't-need-no-steenkin'-layout folks and the how-can-you-call-THAT-communicating folks, and mostly they act contemptuous of each other, which I think is a shame.

There are also people who don't see because they haven't been trained to see, of course. I don't count them among those who don't see because they are incapable of seeing. I think people who have never been taught to see owe it to themselves to get some good training in graphics, as it will make their world richer. Such training would be wasted on people whose brains are wired for content alone, though.

What I'd like to propose is that we stop denigrating people on account of their brains being wired differently from our own. Let's just acknowledge our innate differences and celebrate our respective strengths. Is that too much to ask?

[Please note that in all of the above I am writing about people who are not visually impaired. I'm sure that among the visually impaired some individuals are better at imagining the visual context of information than others, but that's beyond the scope of my knowledge or experience and certainly beyond the scope of this discussion.]


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