Have you ever tasted the colour blue or heard the sound of a sunset? While this might sound like something out of a science fiction novel, it’s a real phenomenon known as synaesthesia. Synaesthesia is a condition in which the senses become intertwined, causing individuals to experience one sensory stimulus as if it were another. In other words, it’s a blending of the senses. This condition is thought to be more common than once believed, with it affecting about 4% of the population.
The article in The Harvard Gazette ‘Making sense of how the blind see colour’ should make those catering for blind audiences sit up and take notice. I visit many art galleries and whilst warmly greeted and offered an head set for audio description, it does not provide me with the evocative access to the paintings that are being described. Wouldn’t it be an incredible step forward to make galleries accessible to and meaningful for those with congenital blindness and vision impairment by having an audio description that adopts a synaesthetic approach? All too often, those catering for people with disabilities do so with the best intentions but with little empathy and rarely any lived experience. If we are going to transform experiences and make our cultural havens truly accessible to all then we have to change our perspectives and really understand (rather than simply imagine) what it is to be different.