@jscholes @mahryekuh Also, blind people write to each other in a way that's quite different from how I might right to a sighted friend. For example, I would never! use an exclamation mark like that to emphasize the word "never" to a sighted friend; I'd just use italics or bold. But I do when addressing other blind folks.
The problems happen when people who spend all day every day only interacting with other blind people start internalizing the "blind writing style" and can't write any other way. It might be useful to define "blind writing style", not to criticize it, but to differentiate it from other writing styles, and give it a defined place in the world.
The characteristics I notice are:
* formatting (line breaks, paragraphs) used where a conversational pause might happen, rather than to separate ideas
* punctuation used to modify intonation, rather than for any grammatical purpose
* more conversational and stream of conscious: blind folks tend to leave in interesting digressions and asides that sighted folk would edit out to shorten the text
* different care about spelling and grammar: whereas lazy sighted people would write "u coming w/ ur gf 2morrow m8?" lazy blind people will leave in dictation errors, or spell phonetically rather than looking it up
@fastfinge@interfree.ca