A Visual Language Barrier

I recently wrote a blog post about Nystagmus the condition I was born with which reduces my vision.  I touched on a few issues and where it can create barriers in life.  It has occurred to me that there is another barrier it has posed to me and that is one of Language.

Learning English in school when I was younger wasn't the easiest of tasks - initially - because many of my teachers did not understand how Nystagmus affected my reading and the school even concluded that I was Dyslexic - I'm not, but I do have many symptoms of Dyslexia.  The main symptom is that I will sometimes miss words when reading or read them in the wrong order - I hated reading aloud in class because of this.  I had no difficulty in understanding what I managed to read and my reading ability developed over time compensating for the Nystagmus.

The specialist teacher who was trained in working with children with special needs quite quickly realised the other teachers were wrong and soon after the teachers apologised to my parents and staff were sent on training days to learn how to deal with these issues.  Thankfully my reading aptitude soon increased and a few years later I was ahead of my class.  Since then I have managed to amass an extensive vocabulary and develop my articulation to the level it now stands.  However if you had never read any of my writings and had you only ever experienced conversation with me face to face you would be forgiven for thinking my writings were written by someone else.  If you follow me on twitter you will gain a more realistic insight into my level of diction in everyday life.

What all this has to do with language is to draw your attention to the initial barrier vision played in learning the language.  I have an interest in languages and I have tried to learn quite a few over the years.  Spanish is the only language I actually had the determination to follow however it will soon be followed by Portuguese, Italian, German and of course French - these languages aren't listed in the order I will learn them though.

Apart from these languages however I have tried to learn a few others and there is a surprising barrier that crops up - the visual barrier.  However this time it is more literal, this isn't just a case of reading words in the wrong order etc, this is a case of reading the words at all.

Those languages that carry this barrier are primarily those that are not written in Latin script.  For those of you who aren't linguistically inclined, this article is written in Latin Script.  Our alphabet as you know it is a sub-set of Latin Script.  Languages which aren't written in Latin Script include:

Arabic:
بياض الثلج
That says Snow White in Arabic.  Arabic is perhaps the hardest I have seen, the calligraphy is so intricate you really need perfect vision to be able to read it at all.

Russian:
Белоснежка
I may not have highlighted this in the other post but one of the main difficulties in reading with Nystagmus is distinguishing letters or any vertical line for example, I would not be able to count how many lines are printed here: ||||| - so reading scripts like this where letters from an English point of view are 'ALL CAPS' and 'small caps' it gets very difficult to read. [That also says Snow White in case you were wondering]

As you can imagine I did not pursue these languages very far, beyond reading the Wikipedia article about their alphabets.  Surprisingly though not all Languages seem to be this ignorant of those with visual impairments.  Mandarin and Japanese are two prime examples, both these languages use non-Latin scripts and both have intricate detailing on these symbols.  [Mandarin and Japanese do share some symbols but their meanings aren't shared in most cases]  Despite this, when displayed on web-pages and in print they are usually printed large enough to the point where reading them is quite easy.  For that reason I would consider them 'Accessible' Languages.


As well as Arabic and Russian there's also Hebrew and Bengali two other languages with the same caveats as Arabic - namely it is nigh impossible to read.

In conclusion I think I count myself very lucky to have been born in a country where English is the native language.  Although Spanish, French, German and Italian at least all share the same Accessibility so being born in any of those countries would also be a great stroke of luck for anyone else in my position.