The eyes have it. Or they don't.

[Dick Margulis <margulisd -at- comcast -dot- net>]

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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