Smart Glasses Phase Two: Adding Detail

This image shows me shopping at the Oxford Cheese Shop in the indoor market. I am in the middle of the picture, gazing down at a mouth-watering display of goat's cheese (my favourites!) I am wearing a chunky black headset with some glasses mounted on the front. I am also wearing a black ruck sack (containing the laptop which is running the cameras on the glasses). To my right is another customer and behind me you can see the television camera which was filming me.

Last August I began working with a research team at Oxford University who are developing some 'smart glasses' which will provide additional information for partially blind users. As I explain here, I was hugely impressed with this new way of navigating and very excited that I could soon be walking around confidently (especially at night, in dappled shade, or in bright sunshine) without bumping into rubbish bins, bollards or other pedestrians. 

Not content with creating an image of the shape, size and position of solid objects, Dr Stephen Hicks and his team are now working on adding detail to the pictures displayed on the glasses. So, as well as telling me that I am approaching a pedestrian, the glasses will now reveal her facial features as well as what she is carrying or wearing. As well as telling me that I am approaching a shop, the glasses will now show me what is in the shop window and might even pick out the shop's name (although the team are still trying to find a camera accurate enough to capture small text).

This week I met up with Dr Stephen Hicks and his team again (along with a film crew from CBS) to discover how the latest version of the glasses might help me run some errands in one of Oxford's busiest and most visually confusing venues, the Covered Market.

I was astonished by the progress that Stephen's team have made in the past year. When I first wore the glasses nine months ago, I felt like I was in a science fiction film. This time it was more like being the heroine in Aha's iconic 1984 Take On Me video. When I put the glasses on I was plunged into an animated world where objects' outlines shimmered wonderfully in black and white.

I have always loved French cheese but tend to find market shopping frustrating. Labels and prices are impossible to see and I can never even tell which products the cheese-monger is pointing to when I ask for advice. I was eager to see if the experience would be any different in my 'smart glasses'.

The first thing that struck me as I looked at the cheeses on display was that I could, for the first time ever, distinguish their different shapes and sizes. My favourite goat's cheese, Crottin de Chavignol, has a distinctive cylindrical shape and I was delighted to discover three lovely Chavignols near the front of the display, all nicely highlighted by the glasses' clever use of dark and light:

This image is a screen-shot taken whilst I was using the glasses to choose my cheeses. Several white lines demarcate shapes on a black background. In the centre of the image, three cylindrical shapes - which I correctly identified as Crottins de Chavignol - are clearly visible.

After making my first purchase, I asked the cheese-monger's advice about another goat's cheese which would nicely complement the first. He recommended a milder one after tasting a sliver, I decided to follow his advice. Unlike Chavignol, this one was not sold in individual portions so I had to decide how much I wanted. Specifying this kind of detail has always been a challenge for me. Usually, when cheese-mongers hold up a piece of cheese, or make a 'bigger or smaller' kind of gesture with their hands, I can see neither the cheese itself, nor their hands. I generally just take what they are offering without being able to tell how much cheese I have in fact bought until I get it home. With the glasses, however, I could very clearly see the outline of the cheese-monger's hands as he held up a piece of Chabichou. I was confidently able to tell him that this was exactly the amount I wanted without running the risk of going home with far too much cheese (or, worse still, not enough!). After the glasses had also helped me check my change, I reluctantly handed them back to Stephen, I headed home with my cheese, satisfied, for perhaps the first time in my life, that I had made some informed shopping decisions based not only on help and advice from others, but also on what I confidently knew was in front of me.

This image shows my purchases with the

distinctive cylindrical Chavignol on the left
. Bon appetit!

My SDS Conference Experience

The image shows my official 'SDS Summer Camp Minneapolis 2014' 
T-shirt (by Teddy's T's) and my (stylish yet practical) 
Society of Disability Studies conference bag. 

Almost as soon as I began working in the field of Disability Studies, I started hearing amazing things about the SDS conference, an annual gathering of Disability Studies scholars, students and activists organised by the US-based Society for Disability Studies.

This year was the first that I managed to find the time and the money to make the trip across the Atlantic to the conference which took place between 11th and 14th June in sunny Minneapolis. Aside from presenting the work that I have been doing at the Valentin Hauy archive in my paper 'Sustaining Blindness in Literature; Lessons from French History', I was looking forward to using the conference to make contacts across the sector as well as getting a real sense of current trends and tendencies in Disability Studies.

The first thing that struck me as I perused the programme was that SDS is so much more than an academic conference. As well as the scholarly sessions I was expecting - where 3 or 4 academics present a 20-minute paper and then take questions - there was a huge variety of other kinds of sessions offered, including workshops, meetings, performances and even yoga! I attended a very thought-provoking workshop on 'Disability Culture Pedagogy' in which five teachers shared ideas for bringing disability-centred practice into the classroom. In another session on universal design, we heard about how five 'disability objects' have the power to change the ways in which the non-disabled relate to their everyday environment. I was particularly excited to attend a lunchtime meeting on 'Blogging in the Disability Community' where I learnt more about some great blogs (including That Crazy Crippled Chick, Autistichoya, Words I Wheel By, Bad Cripple, Lead On Network, CP Shoes and Claiming Crip) and shared advice, stories and more. I'm hoping that this will lead to an improved blog presence on the SDS website as well as the establishment of an SDS Bloggers special interest group.

Much more than the content of the panels and sessions themselves, it was the atmosphere of the conference which I found most refreshing and rewarding. It was such a treat to be in a place with 400 like-minded people who understand why disability needs to be talked about. When explaining my work to my non-disabled friends and colleagues, I frequently find myself needing to use all my energy merely to justify the importance and relevance of Disability Studies before I can even get on to the actual work I do. Everyone at SDS is already committed to furthering work in this crucial field of study: it was such a pleasure to share my thoughts and findings with a supportive and encouraging community of scholars and students.

Travelling alone to a huge conference can feel isolating and lonely and I was fully prepared to spend my evenings and lunch hours on my own with my kindle. But it turns out that Disability Studies folk love to party! I made my first new friends in the taxi ride from the airport and within minutes of picking up my registration pack I felt bathed in the warm glow of friendship. I spent more time eating and drinking with friends than I would have thought possible and even ended up sharing my room with a conference delegate and her dog one night. As well as catching up with some of the friends I made at last year's History of Blindness conference in Paris, I made some great new friends whom I'm already looking forward to seeing again as we work together on future projects.

Unsurprisingly, this was without doubt the most accessible conference I have ever been to. There was lots of space for wheelchair riders and service dogs and presenters were issued with comprehensive guidelines about how to make their papers accessible to all. All sessions had live captioning and ASL signing, braille, and large-print programmes were available on request. When I arrived I was given a free and extremely helpful 'orientation tour' of all the conference venues and I was sent a detailed description of the layout of my room (including the whereabouts of crucial items like light switches and plugs), in advance of my arrival. But there were times when blind and partially blind delegates did not have access to as much information as their sighted peers. Neither of the plenary sessions were audio-described and as one involved a certain amount of visual comedy, and the other an extensive and detailed powerpoint presentation, I didn't get as much out of either as I would have liked. The Society's 'silent auction' which raises money for scholarships, was very sight-reliant. Even though the organiser was happy to make time to describe some of the items to me, I found it hard to get excited about bid details that I could not see. There was also an extensive book display which was hard for me to properly appreciate. A digital list of auction items and books on display would have been enormously helpful (and presumably very easy to produce.) These are minor quibbles which did not spoil my overall conference experience. (And next year I'll know to specify these needs clearly on the registration form.) But they did make me think about the differences and divisions which exist even within the disability community.

These worries notwithstanding, I had a hugely positive and life-enhancing experience at SDS and I really hope to be able to attend again in Atlanta next year. It truly is a conference like no other and I'd urge anyone working on - or interested in - the field of Disability Studies to try and get there at least once.

Sustaining Disability: Lessons from French History

This week I am honoured to be speaking at the Society for Disability Studies annual conference in Minneapolis. Below is a transcription of my paper along with some useful links and the French originals of the English passages I'll be quoting. (All translations are my own).

Sustaining Blindness in Literature: 

A Lesson From French History

The ideal of sustaining - indeed celebrating - disability for its own sake tends to be thought of as a post-modern notion which is still being explored and argued for by Disability Studies scholars and activists. But nineteenth-century French blind activist and teacher Maurice de la Sizeranne developed a project in Paris – the creation of a book collection devoted to representations of blindness and to books by blind or partially blind authors - which can be seen as a forerunner of twenty-first century attempts to positively sustain disability.

This collection, which is now housed, in far from ideal conditions, in a meeting room in the Association Valentin Hauy, 5, rue Duroc in Paris, France, is an invaluable source of information not only about how the sighted saw blindness and blind people, but also about how blind writers saw, and continue to see, themselves. In its scope and ambition it is comparable to the Jacobus tenBroek Library at the National Federation of the Blind, the Hayes library at the Perkins School for the Blind and the Migel Library which was once at the American Foundation for the Blind and is now at the American Printing House of the Blind. But unlike these American collections, the Valentin Hauy library is the only one of its kind to deal with works in French. Unfortunately, the present directors of the Association Valentin Hauy do not fully appreciate the importance of sustaining historical archives. Not only are the books not being carefully preserved, the library catalogue only exists in print and can therefore only be consulted in person in Paris by people who can access small typefaces or who can take a reader with them. One of my aims in my current research project is to create a digitised version of the catalogue and of the most significant books it contains.

Inspired by the work of Cathy Kudlick and Zina Weygand, whose reclaiming of nineteenth-century French blind writer Thérèse-Adèle Husson has drawn attention to the existence of Sizeranne’s Valentin Hauy collection, my work seeks both to exploit and to sustain Sizeranne’s collection for current and future generations of Disability Studies scholars and students. In my paper today I would like to provide an insight into the collection by discussing how two texts which I found thanks to the Hauy archive encourage us to rethink received notions of value, normality and tragedy, notions, in fact, whose problematic sustainability poses ethical and representational challenges to Disability Studies.

In their work on Husson, Kudlick and Weygand focused almost exclusively on her autobiographical writings. But Husson also wrote sentimental novels primarily intended for the moral instruction of young ladies. In contrast to the modern and something surprisingly enlightened way that Husson talks about blindness in her autobiography (which you can read in both English and French online - her novels often reinforce traditional nineteenth-century myths or stereotypes of blindness (some of which, as David Bolt’s 2014 work The Metanarrative of Blindness shows, still persist to this day) whereby blindness is a tragedy, even a fate worse than death, and the category problematically labelled ‘the blind’ are either sub or super human beings who should be praised, pitied, neglected or avoided.

Indeed this quotation from Simi Linton’s 1998 Claiming Disability shows how widespread this problem is amongst the non disabled:

’Representations of disability and the representation of disabled people’s place in society are largely in the hands of people schooled in a particular vision of disability, one that is saturated with deterministic thinking and characterised by maudlin and morbid sentiments projected onto disabled people’s experience. The insistence not just that disability is an unfortunate occurrence but that disabled people are, perforce, “unfortunates”, seeps into most reports on the disability experience.’

But in one little-known collection of short moral tales, Moral Distractions or Virtue in Action [Le Passe-temps moral ou la vertu mis en action (Paris: Belin, 1837 3rd edition)], Husson presents an intriguingly modern approach to disability which seems to at least in part alleviate Linton’s worries and foreshadow the concerns of this conference by seeking to celebrate disability for its own sake.

In the story ‘The Good Father’s Lesson’ [‘Leçon d’un bon père’], an eleven-year-old boy, Adolphe, is playing in the park when he sees a so-called invalid, later introduced as Jean-Louis Grossard, talking to Monsieur Dupré, his tutor.

The boy’s reaction to Grossard, who has a wooden leg, a patch over one eye and two missing fingers, is blunt but not unexpected given the prevailing attitudes of the time: ‘How I pity you, you poor man’ [p. 208: ‘Combien je vous trouve malheureux.’] And indeed this exclamation echoes Husson’s descriptions of her own plight which she often describes as ‘unfortunate’ ‘pitiable’ and ‘sad’.

But it is Grossard’s response which is revealing: ‘ "Poor man, you say", said the invalid, getting up proudly, "I’ll have you know I have three sons, the oldest of which is no older than you, and if they ever spoke to me like that I would surely disinherit them!" ' [p. 208 : ‘ – Malheureux, dites-vous? reprit l’invalide en se relevant fièrement, j’ai trios fils, dont l’aîné n’est pas plus âgé que vous ; si jamais l’un d’eux me tenait un pareil langage, je crois que je le désavouerais !’].

It transpires not only that Grossard is proud of his disabilities – which he received during his thirty-six years of military service, but also that he wants to expose his sons to the risk of sustaining similar injuries by encouraging all three of them to become soldiers. Adolphe struggles to understand Grossard’s point of view:

‘The fact that this unfortunate man does not complain about his situation shows a resignation I can well understand even if this kind of resignation is very rare, but that he wants to expose his children to the same dangers, indeed that he attaches a kind of glory to this, is, in my opinion, a sign that he is taking his own enthusiasm much too far.’ [p. 210 : ‘que cet infortuné ne se plaigne point de sa situation, c’est une résignation que je conçois très-bien, quoi qu’elle doive être fort rare ; mais vouloir exposé ces enfants à de pareils dangers, à y attacher toute sa gloire, c’est, à mon avis, pousser l’enthousiasme jusqu’ à l’extravagance’.]

Unlike Adolphe, who is clearly horrified by the idea that Grossard’s sons might voluntarily put themselves in a position where they become as disabled as their father, all three boys do in fact want to be soldiers, despite, or perhaps because of, being confronted with their father’s disabilities every day.

Although it is possible to read this story as nothing more than a sentimental celebration of national pride and the glories of war, I would like to suggest that Grossard’s desire for his sons to risk their own limbs and sight foreshadows the late twentieth-century Disability Pride movement and encourages the nineteenth-century reader, who, like Adolphe, may not have been exposed to such feelings before, to think carefully about the assumptions which are too easily and quickly made about the value and quality of life.

Husson’s attempt to celebrate disability is extended in a 1882 story ‘Amongst the Blind’ [‘Entre aveugles’] by nineteenth-century Franco-Italian writer Marc Monnier. In this story the author offers a striking argument in favour of the sustaining of disability. He uses a question and answer style dialogue reminiscent of Cara Liebowitz’s persuasive blog post ‘Explaining Inspiration Porn to the Non Disabled’on her That Crazy Crippled Chic blog: like Cara’s piece, this short story is deliberately didactic and as such is written in a persuasive and provocative way in an attempt to both enlighten and convince an audience who may not have encountered such views before.

Indeed, in this short story, Monnier does a great job of avoiding the ableist traps which Linton highlights in her book.

A painter has come to a rural town to decorate its church when he happens across an old doctor friend he used to know in Paris. The Doctor lives in an institution for the blind [‘hospice d’aveugles’] and takes the painter to visit it. What follows is a dialogue in which the doctor – in a fascinating deconstruction of the medical model - debunks a succession of myths and misconceptions about blindness and 'the blind' voiced by the painter. One example occurs as the painter admires the beautiful scenery and then exclaims:

- How sad it is!
- Why?
- The poor blind people here can’t appreciate it.
- Who gave you that idea?
- Can they see the river?
- No, but they can feel it. They love to come and sit, as you are sitting, on the edge of the balcony.

[p. 238 : ‘C’est triste!
Pourquoi?
Les pauvres aveugles qui sont ici n’en jouissent pas.
Qui te l’a dit ?
Ils voient la rivière ?
Ils la sentent. Ils viennent, volontiers s’asseoir comme toi sur le parapet.]

The Doctor goes on to explain how the blind residents appreciate the smell and feel of the breezes coming off the river and that they notice sounds that the sighted do not.

The painter functions in this text as a symbol of ocularcentrism – he has an unshakeable belief that sight is the most important and privileged of the senses and that anyone who does not have it is necessarily doomed to have a lesser experience of life and the world. The Doctor counters by explaining that Milton’s gradual sight loss opened him up to a wider world of experiences than sighted poets like Dante, and demonstrates how 'the blind' are better placed to appreciate the finer qualities of poetry, arguing that the newly blind are sometimes so pleased with their new appreciation of poetry that they do not just find consolation but positive joy and pleasure in being blind. Even when the Dr goes on to reverse the normal-abnormal binary by arguing that he knows blind children who see sightedness as a disability, the painter remains unconvinced. Despite the fact that this statement still relies on the binary opposition between disabled and non-disabled which can be problematic, it nonetheless demonstrates a positive approach to blindness which celebrates it for its own sake. The Doctor’s opinions thus hopefully encourage the non-disabled to rethink what they assume to be their own privileged position in the hierarchy of perfection and normalcy.

The twist in the story comes when the doctor suddenly stops referring to the blind using ‘they’ as he says: ‘our other senses become sharper : we learn to listen, something we hadn’t known how to do until now.’

The Doctor’s switch from ‘they’ to ‘we’ in his discussions of the blind is intriguing. At this point in the story we have not been told whether he is blind or sighted but because we are reading from the point of view of the implicitly sighted reader, and because he is a doctor, we assume that he is sighted and lives in the hospice as a professional rather than a patient. His use of ‘we’ challenges the distinction made throughout the text between the two disparate groups ‘the sighted’ and ‘the blind’: it argues that sight or lack of sight is not a defining characteristic but one amongst many elements and that there exists a continuum between people with different levels of blindness or non-blindness. In this way it is a forerunner of David Bolt’s use of the ‘those of us who’ formulation which emphasizes that blindness is not a marker of inherent and inhuman difference.

In fact as the doctor continues to refute the painter’s increasingly ocularnormative assumptions, we learn that the doctor lives in the hospice because his parents, who met in the hospice as blind children, still live there. Before revealing his true identity to the painter, the doctor describes the love affair between these two blind children who were eventually allowed to marry despite some peoples’ concerns over the consequences of allowing two blind people to marry and have children. When the painter asks if their child was born blind, the doctor replies, ‘no more than me’ before revealing that he is in fact the son in question. By refusing to clarify how much the son - and thus the doctor - can or cannot see, Monnier frustrates the painter’s – and indeed the reader’s - attempt to construct a hierarchical relationship between blindness and non-blindness. Instead he playfully calls into question the non-disabled person’s tendency to see disability as lack by rendering the blindness (or not) of the doctor unknowable and thus ultimately inconsequential, indeed irrelevant.

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that the presence of such enlightened ideas within texts written in nineteenth-century France reveals that current arguments about the value of disability have been around for much longer than we might have thought. These texts have, until recently, remained hidden, buried in archives, and ironically inaccessible to the very people who need to use them as evidence against the kind of reductionist views represented in these stories by the boy Adolphe and the painter.

Disability Studies in the Classroom

Earlier this week I ran a workshop at the Higher Education Academy Arts and Humanities Teaching and Learning Conference at the Lowry Centre, Salford Quays. In the session I explained how I argued that disability (and Disability Studies) can offer much to non-disabled students and teachers.. Then my friend and colleague Sherie Griffiths explained how in her work with businesses, she emphasises the importance of audio (rather than visual) communication.

Here is the paper I gave:

When Monsters Talk Back: 

How Disability Studies Can Enhance (Mainstream) Teaching and Learning Strategies

In her 1998 essay Claiming Disability Studies, Simi Linton argues that Disability Studies is an essential component in liberal arts degree programmes. Whilst disability has existed for some time as a module or option on courses in what we might call the applied arts and humanities such as social work, music therapy and teacher training, it is only very gradually beginning to appear in traditional arts and humanities subjects like English, History and Modern Languages. Where it does exist in a university setting is in the student support departments dealing with pastoral issues, extenuating circumstances, special teaching and assessment arrangements. But just because universities are able to support disabled students does not mean that they are working within the framework of Disability Studies. Indeed some support services can unintentionally reinforce negative stereotypes or create unhelpful myths of disability because students seeking such support are always seen as deviating from the norm. Consequently, students with disabilities are often reluctant to ask for help or declare their disability because of fears that this will adversely affect their studies and, more importantly, their career prospects. Disabled staff in HE are even less visible than their students.

Yet Disability Studies is hugely relevant to the humanities because it addresses questions which are central to the ways we understand the world. Its challenge to notions of normality, beauty, perfection, value and usefulness are relevant to everyone, disabled or non disabled.

Today I would like to discuss ways in which content, methodologies and approaches inspired by Disability Studies might be productively used in HE learning and teaching more generally and the impact this might have on both non disabled and disabled students. In so doing we would like to encourage you to question assumptions about ‘normality’ and embrace the 'monstrous'.

I have been registered blind all my life but because I have what ophthalmologists like to call ‘some useful sight’, in one eye, I have, until recently, always operated in a sighted way and done my best to ‘pass’ as a fully sighted person. Whilst at an academic conference two years ago I realised that it was time to embrace my identity as a partially-blind university lecturer and place it at the centre of my academic career. As I read Georgina Kleege's important book Sight Unseen, I realised that blindness was not something to be ashamed of or hidden, but something to be claimed, embraced, celebrated. I gave up trying to 'pass' as a sighted academic and 'came out' as blind to my students and colleagues. 

As well as beginning to focus on disability-related texts and issues in my teaching and in my research, this also meant thinking about alternative strategies for engaging with my students in the classroom. I was finding it difficult to keep my classes focused and make sure that everyone was contributing when I couldn’t make eye contact with my students or see who or where they were. So I began developing alternative techniques: I started asking students to break the habit of a lifetime by shouting out questions and comments rather than putting their hands up. I asked them to call on each other when they could see that someone had something to say, and I got them to say their name before they spoke. At first I found them incredibly reluctant to engage with me in this way but they have gradually become more confident about this interactive and student-led way of learning. As a result we’ve had some great discussions, both inside and outside seminars, I feel like I know them much better than I used to and I've found that they are much more willing to accept that sight-based communication is not the only way of interacting in a classroom – or indeed in life. Consequently they are learning that blindness in particular, – and disability in general - is not necessarily a negative or tragic experience: it is simply a different way of being in the world. They feel more confident about expressing their own needs as learners and they are more accepting of other peoples’ differences. What started as a set of practical solutions to deal with the impact my blindness was having on my teaching has become a whole new approach to difference, ability, the hierarchy of the senses, identity, authenticity, acceptance and even personhood.

One of the advantages of being open and honest about my blindness in the classroom, on twitter and in my blog ‘Blind Spot’ (which I encourage students to read), is that students feel empowered to apply what they have learnt from me and my teaching methods to the materials we study. More broadly, looking at sight and vision differently often helps students to question attitudes to related notions like normality, beauty and perfection. Such discussions also call into question the supremacy of the visual medium of film. After being taught by me, students tell me they feel able to challenge the widespread assumption that disability is about tragedy, struggle, suffering and pity. Not only can I encourage my students to see disability in a positive way, I can also help them question their own preconceptions as well of those of society in general.

One example of the way I use course content to encourage my students to think critically is the film Amélie which I teach as part of a final-year course on representations of Paris in fiction and film. In Jean-Pierre Jeunet's 2001 film, the eponymous heroine devotes herself to a succession of fairytale-Godmother-like good deeds. One such endeavour consists of guiding a blind man across a road and along a busy street before depositing him at the entrance to the local metro station.

As they go along, Amélie gives him a gossipy audio-description of the people and shops they pass. On one level, this episode is a piece of harmless fun. It demonstrates the vibrancy of the rue Lepic area whilst highlighting Amélie's eye for amusing detail and flair for language. But this extract is also problematic when viewed from a Disability Studies perspective. Not only does Amélie fail to ask the blind man where he wants to go, she doesn't give him the chance to get a word in edgeways. She points out the smell of the greengrocer's melon (a smell the man would surely have recognised for himself) without bothering to grab a piece for him to taste. She tells him what is on sale at the butcher's without checking that he has already done his shopping. And she describes delicious-sounding cheeses to him without asking him if he'd like to stop and choose some. I find food shopping in France a beguiling yet frustrating business: there is just too much choice and it all smells so wonderful. I love French cheese but always feel like I am missing out by not being able to read all the labels and make an educated selection - if I met Amélie in Montmatre, I'd insist (if she ever stopped talking) that she describe the cheese to me in mouth-watering detail rather than rushing me past the shop at dizzying speed. But here she keeps the blind man trapped in his own passivity, thus perpetuating the myth that the blind are helpless and vulnerable.

Amélie's actions are certainly well-intentioned, and the dazzling way that the blind man's face is lit up at the end of the clip suggests that Jeunet too thinks that this must have been a genuinely wonderful experience for him. But this way of thinking suggests that the blind are lacking something in their relationship with the world which they must rely on the kind-hearted to give them. That a world without sight is a world without knowledge, sensation and community. That sight is better than no sight. This is perhaps not a surprising reaction from a film-maker. But what if this blind man relates to the world in a wholly different way? What if the pictures he gets from hearing, touching, smelling and tasting the world are just as fulfilling as Amélie's and Jeunet's fetishization of vision? Or, more worryingly, what if Amélie's unsolicited arrival in his life has shown him a world that he was not even aware of? Will he be left happy and grateful to have experienced more fully the world around him? Or will he be left feeling miserable and inadequate, having discovered that others prize most highly a sense that he does not share.

My students only noticed the more problematic elements of this scene after I’d talked to them about my own blindness and used my non-visual communication techniques with them. Where they had once unquestioningly accepted the episode as an example of Amelie’s Princess-Diana-like goodness, they now began displaying impressive levels of critical analysis in their responses to it.

This dual approach, where I talk to students about the practicalities of how their learning will be a different experience because of my blindness, and then ask them to rethink their own understanding of disability through course content, means that they are much less ready to accept the stereotypes and clichés of disability with which popular culture surrounds us.