Races and Faces

One of the most frequently asked questions is this one:  How can a blind person identify races and faces?  A very good question and I'll do my best to answer this one.  For as long as I can remember, I was brought up to understand the differences between and among races and faces.  My family was extremely describing these to me and when I received my gift of new vision as a teen, I was able to tell the difference between races and faces.  That really helped me and now that I operate mostly in the dark, it has all served me well.

 

For someone who was born with insufficient vision to be able to distinguish races and faces, the story is quite different.  Many blind persons are fully aware of the various races and they also know that each person's face is unique in its own way but how do you ask, can they tell the difference among and between races?  Ah, and alas, enter the sense of hearing and for the most part it works.  It's usually telling the difference through someone's accent but wait!  Sometimes this strategy does not quite work.

 

If for example a person of either Chinese or East Indian descent has grown up in Quebec and has a French Canadian accent, then there is the challenge and more often than not, a blind person has to depend on other techniques such as:  Listening to the intonation of the person's voice.  I should point out here that the type of voice also helps to decipher races.  A Caucasian person for example has a different type of voice to someone who is black.  When the ear is so finely tuned as that of a blind person, they can often use it to dig deeper to decipher even more.

 

If you would like to learn more about all of this, then by all means, visit www.acb.org, or www.afb.org.

 

I'm Donna J. Jodhan your friendly accessibility advocate wishing you a terrific day and encouraging you to go out there and tell the rest of the world how blind persons go about telling the differences between races.