The saying goes you never know a good thing until you lose it. Most humans use their eyes more than any other sense to interact with the world. However when you’re blind, you need to rely on all your other senses so much more.
To help us to experience first hand the challenges that the blind must undertake everyday and also to discover the beauty of opening up our eyes (pardon the pun) to our other senses, Lisboa Sensorial in Lisbon, Portugal provides blind tours of Lisbon, led by the blind.
The site : www.cabracega.org/lisboa-sensorial
Info Source : http://springwise.com/weekly/2008-07-30.htm#sensorial
BLIND RESTAURANTS
There are also Blind Restaurants available in some cities across the world where you experience your meal in the darkness and where your waiter/waitress can often be blind as well.
For more information on Blind Restaurants, check out :
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article525187.ece
LANGUAGE CHALLENGE INITIATIVE
Similiarly, I have been involved in international conferences in my student days back at university in Canada. As an interesting awareness building effort, the conference hosts which were based out of a French Canadian province decided to hold the conference in French while providing all non french speaking participants (ie. most everyone!) translation boxes where participants would listen in to a translation of the dialogue/presentations in real time.
This experience was a real eye opener for many participants who never have to go through this experience — English speakers rarely do — and who realised how awkward the process was for non native English speakers at their conferences.
RAISING AWARENESS
Hopefully experiences like these can help us to learn to be more aware of the challenges faced by the blind and other people with disabilities, but also appreciate the bright sides of what they experience through their situation everyday.
Have you heard of other experiences like these which put people in similar situations ?