More fodder for my How to Be Sighted class

[cosmolinguist]

In the really interesting comments to a really interesting link, jesse_the_k asked me if starting to use a white cane has made crossing the street different. My answer included a story from Thursday that I've been meaning to blog about anyway, so I'll just copy the whole thing here.


Definitely. In tons of ways. Sometimes cars will stop and I'm pretty sure they are indicating for me to cross. But if I'm not really sure, I won't do it. I can't tell if they're waiting for me, another car, or just a light that's about to change and I'll always choose waiting, feeling awkward, and maybe annoying them over any chance of getting run over!

Lots of times other pedestrians waiting to cross too will tell me when they think it's safe/when they start to cross the road themselves, even though I'll almost always wait for the green man. At least one man (middle-aged, white, northern English) sort of bullied me across the road with him when I was waiting at an intersection where I knew the lights take a long time to cycle through. He wasn't accepting my polite refusals of crossing the road when he did, and I ended up having to do so just because I didn't want him to grab me and push me along with him like it looked he was about to, in the name of jocular helpfulness that can be so nice in some contexts and makes me happy to live in a northern English culture, but the downside is there's no effective way to refuse that "help" sometimes.

Another anecdote about "help": The other day I was waiting at an intersection in the middle of town, and saw someone next to me cross the road while I'd pushed the button for the green man but was still waiting by the red one, with my fingers on the spinny cone. Then she walked back across the road to me again. I thought she must be a very confused person. And, oh no, she was heading towards me. I braced myself to have to give directions or something (I was struggling across the city centre with a suitcase and had a lot on my mind, so didn't have a lot of physical or mental energy at this point).

But she just got right up in my face (blind people don't need personal space, right? we must not; she's hardly the first person to do this) and said "there's no beep." Now I was confused.

I forgot that sighted people seem to think blind people can only know when to cross roads if there's an audible beep to go along with the green man. Blind people know that this isn't going to happen where I was (about to cross a bus lane, with tram lines behind me and a busy road to my left) because it wouldn't be clear which crossing the beep was indicating it'd be safe to cross! And there needs to be a tactile indicator anyway, for people with both sight and hearing loss. And I never pay any attention to which crossings beep or not anyway, I couldn't keep track.

I said "I know!" before I could temper by surprise into something less rude, and then added "it's okay" because I didn't want any more "help." So she went back across the road, and I waited because the man was still red (and I know she'd safely crossed this road three times in the time I'd been waiting, but I was crossing a bus lane, and when I'm not hugely impatient I'm more than happy to wait for my green man!), probably thinking she'd done her good deed by helping a poor disabled lady, even though the disabled lady was also stupid or something because she didn't take advantage of the help.

Comments

[cosmolinguist]

Hilariously, one of my phone's quirks is that it's only giving me audio and not video of almost anything I try to watch. So I've already found the description really useful! Thanks for sharing the video, and doing this.