“The power of language to stimulate visual imagination allows all of us, even the congenitally blind, to see with another person’s eyes.” Oliver Sacks, The Mind’s Eye, 2010

What is Vislan?

Vislan is a project that intends to make the richness of the experiences of visual culture autonomously attainable to people who are remote from them.

The Vislan method, created by Mr Geoffrey Munck, leverages the skills that blind people develop for conceptualising their surroundings, and applies them to guide sighted people to improve their powers of observation and description. Removing lack of sight as a barrier to meaningful engagement with visual culture can help to end the sense of social exclusion felt by people who may not be able to see quite so well. 

Vislan is not a disability aid although the blind are among those to benefit from it. Rather it is an innovative approach to community communication that is informed by the lived experience of blindness, with game changing benefits for the sighted and visually remote alike.

How Vislan works

Questions posed by a visually remote individual lead a dialogue in which a sighted person's replies reveal visible phenomena.

Through this process of visual translation not only can the visually remote person generate a more complete conceptualisation, but the sighted must slow down and really see what they are looking at.

Vislan’s specific question and answer format seeks to improve on tactile and audio description techniques that suffer from brevity, uni-directional communication and inadvertant censorship. Unfortunately such processes are costly to produce and can cause valuable information to be omitted, denying the audience the dignity of exploring and reaching their own conclusions. The Vislan technique affords vision-impaired individuals comparable experiences to that of the sighted audience. This averts the tendency to single out the visually remote for limited engagement with sample content.