Objective: To outline a methodical approach to describing the visual world to blind children

• Both the teacher and the blind child suffer from limited time; you cannot describe everything in detail to the child. It is therefore important to view description as an absolutely vital but limited resource.
• First, ask why a child needs to know about what you can see. The purpose of knowing will help you to edit your description: Any description of a physical environment or picture is capable of being utilized for a wide variety of purposes. If you look outside your window you will see a panorama, which might be described in terms of its architecture, biology, history, or social purpose. So your first question is “Why am I describing this?”
• We need to decide “what” to describe, limiting ourselves to those features relevant to enhancing the child’s experience or enabling her to complete a given task.
• Description should be concrete, and as numeric as possible; that is, dimensions in numeric value and proportionality compared to tactile experience (few children will have climbed from the foot to the roof of a building). For example, “What I am seeing is much wider than it is long, like your sleeping room.” Description should pay attention to chronology (what happened first, second, third) and ranking (e.g., biggest to smallest).
• Congenitally totally blind children will only understand color as a socially acceptable concept (e.g., the sky is blue, the grass is green), such that she might question the statement, “The sky is yellow, the grass is red.”
• It is extremely important in dynamic social situations to describe carefully the facial expressions of peers reacting to a conversation, not jumping to crude assessments such as “angry” when what you might mean is “puzzled;” tell the truth, but be accurate, as this is part of a child’s learning what reaction her behavior and speech provoke.
• Models are better than tactile drawings.
• Use class time to encourage different children to describe the same thing; this will help the children and their blind peer to learn that, in spite of numerical values, different people see the same thing in different ways.
• Guidelines for writing descriptions for STEM graphics (diagrams, charts, graphs, etc.) and for the images and graphics associated with assessments are available from the National Center on Accessible Media.