How would it be for a person who is absolutely-abled and can see everything perfectly suddenly go blind? No I am not talking of any tragic incident but of an experiment that is being carried out at South Street Seaport making the New Yorkers understand and respect the ability to see. It’s called the Dialogue in the Dark and prompts visitors to experience and live the life of a blind, if only for one hour.
The exercise will leave New Yorkers entirely without vision. When they enter the exhibit in which it will all be carried out, they will be given walking sticks to understand how blind people feel while walking. They will also be given a guide who will either be blind or will be visually impaired and will aid these people in navigating the exhibit.
Explaining the exhibit to you, it has the first stop as a set that mimics and face-off of the Central Park. In this experiment you realise that when one sensory organ does not function well, the other one takes responsibility of guiding you and this is exactly what happens in case of visually impaired people too. As your roam about in the Park you see how you get attracted to the Fairway supermarket, the Subway and the heart of Times Square.
It has been all put up with the efforts of the Lighthouse International which is a leading non-profit that has been dedicated to fighting vision loss. They do this through prevention, treatment and empowerment of these vision-impaired people. By this experiment of theirs, they let the visitors learn that the visually impaired people are quite well-abled to take their stand in the tough terrains of the world.
