Blindness and the Barriers to the Ancient World

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about information deprivation. These aren’t new thoughts. As a blind person, I’m constantly denied access to information that other people take for granted. That denial isn’t malicious, it’s simply a result of living in a world that isn’t designed for people like me. There are lots of very important areas where information access is a concern. Yet there are niche areas as well. Areas that aren’t vital for my survival, like access to healthcare information, but would enrich my life. One such area is access to information about the ancient world.

I have an interest in classical antiquity. I can’t tell you where it comes from exactly. I’ve always enjoyed watching documentaries and reading books, and somewhere in all of that I must have stumbled across some information that gripped me. The result is that when I’m not studying for my actual degree, I spend a lot of time reading books on the ancient world.

I’m fortunate that there are many things I can access. I can read literature, both from and about antiquity. I can watch documentaries, though how accessible they are depends on their reliance on undescribed images. I enjoy the many people on YouTube who are trying to make classics accessible and engaging for ordinary people. I also love how authors are bringing mythology into the modern world. Yes, I’m a Percy Jackson fan.

But I want more. Always, I want more. I want to know what monuments look like. I want to feel ancient artifacts, or run my fingers over statues, appreciating every minute detail. I want to explore a map, showing what we think a city might have looked like. I want to know all the things other people get to know without having to try. And right now I can’t easily do that.

Even when I visit historical locations, it isn’t quite the same. It brings me great joy and there is indescribable value in traveling, but I still don’t have quite the same experience that others do. Someone might describe it to me, and perhaps I get to run my fingers over the stone. But I can never step back and look over the ruins and understand how they all fit together. I get to experience them in tiny fragments, never the whole.

So how do we make this accessible to blind people? I have a few ideas. One way I can see blind people getting greater access to physical objects and locations is through 3D printing. It’s not the same as holding the artifact itself, but that isn’t always possible. What 3D printing would do is allow me to feel an object and understand what it actually “looks” like. This isn’t a new idea, educators of blind children have been creating tactile models for years and years. But it’s important to me that these models would be accurate, rather than approximations that sort of look the same if you can see, but wouldn’t give me accurate information.

I’d love for 3D printing to be used so that I could understand what monuments and other locations look like as well. Take the Acropolis for example. You could make several models, which would give a blind person an idea of it from various perspectives, much like a sighted person might look at a collection of photos. You could have a general view of the entire location, views of individual buildings, and then cross-sections of those buildings so I know what they might look like inside.

Again, these aren’t new ideas. Tactile maps have been created that allow blind people to explore locations. It’s exciting that they are actually going to produce tactile models of the monuments so that blind visitors to the Acropolis can enjoy them. But as 3D printing gets more and more affordable, I think there is a real opportunity to give blind people access to this fascinating and complex history from their homes and schools, rather than only when they visit those locations.

For this to happen we’d need to recruit some willing people with expertise in classics and design. I am neither of those people. I have no expertise in either classics or design. I’m just a bit of a geek who likes history and mythology. But I do understand blindness and blind people. I know how our brains operate, and I know enough blind people that I could find a group with really diverse perspectives. By working together, we could create designs that are fit for purpose. Designs that can be broken down into their individual parts so that a blind person could access these artifacts and locations as a whole, but also exploring them in finer detail. Some models and tactile designs can get too busy. A sighted person can look at them, but it’s hard to differentiate what’s going on as a blind person. This is why we’d need an interdisciplinary team who can figure it out together.

There is another area where blind people are falling behind. We need to make sure that blind people who do want to take this seriously can get access to a quality education. I was able to start learning Biblical Hebrew because I am fortunate enough to know a blind teacher. She didn’t just explain the language to me, she was also able to talk me through the intricacies of Hebrew braille, so that I could learn to read and write it accurately. Most blind people aren’t so fortunate. We can learn these languages, but it’s most often a lonely and arduous task. Learning Greek, or Hebrew, or Aramaic is hard enough for a sighted student without having to try and learn the script with absolutely no support. This goes beyond learning in a classroom environment. There are very few resources that enable blind students to learn independently. So for those who have a casual interest, or for younger people who want to start learning in their own time, there’s almost no way to start as there are no accessible online resources.

Sometimes, ancient languages don’t even have an official braille code. So blind students and scholars are forced to try and develop one alongside their studies. Whilst this is exciting for some of them, who develop a research interest in that area, a blind person shouldn’t essentially be forced to research it because they have no other way of continuing their studies without it.

Whilst I’ve highlighted a lot of barriers in this post, I hope that I’ve also suggested a few solutions. I don’t know that I’m the right person to make this happen. In fact I don’t really know where to get started. But I hope that someone will read this and believe that there is a whole world out there to explore, and I deserve to explore it too.