A few years ago, I determined that I have aphantasia. People with aphantasia (some use the term “aphantasics”), have reduced or no ability to form mental images. For most of my life, I didn’t realize that most people do have that ability! Aphantasics assume that references to visual imagery are metaphorical, and I learned to use the same metaphors, much like a blind person who says “See you later!”. One day, I searched online for the term “do people who say they see what they imagine actually see it?”. That led to resources about aphantasia, and I eventually concluded that it applies to me.
Aphantasia has been primarily recognized, labeled, and studied just in the past decade. Research shows that visual imagery exists (news to me), and that some people are unable to form it (news to most people). Why this phenomenon exists is not established, and there may be multiple reasons for it. The description resonates with people who have come to similar conclusions about themselves that I did. Communities have formed for people to explore the impact of this on their lives.
One question that is often asked is whether aphantasia is a disability or a disorder. That’s a complex question, but most people with aphantasia at this time do not consider it to be either. My personal view is that it is not a disorder, but rather is a part of natural variation in human characteristics. But I do think that in some contexts it could be considered a disability, as the inability to form images can make certain activities challenging.
As an accessibility professional, it has been interesting to consider these questions. What are the ways that aphantasia creates challenges in someone’s life, and in what ways it might be possible to accommodate those differences?
The challenge for people with aphantasia is that lack of visual imagery impacts their ability in certain tasks. For instance, if asked to imagine an object, one might imagine the concept of the object, but not the full details that a person with visual imagination sees. Without images, people with aphantasia also struggle to mentally manipulate visual information, such as mirroring and rotation, needed in our lives more than you’d think. Further, visual memory in people with aphantasia is as blurry as is visual imagination. Tasks that rely on recall of visual details can be extremely difficult.
Here are some daily challenges that I experience which I think come from this:
- Icon-based interfaces are really hard. I just cannot remember the meaning of the shapes designed into various icons, so can never remember which icon goes with which function. In my case, colour is the only association I seem to remember, but it is not distinctive enough to identify icons. For instance, I may remember that the function I want is activated by a mostly blue icon, but I still have to look through all the mostly blue icons and try each of them to find the right one.
- Maps are hard to follow, as the difference between the 2-d map and the 3-d world is hard to bridge in my brain. When I lived near Boston, I found the city street layout impossible to learn. The map always looked different from the streets and I’d get lost nearly every time.
- Visually-oriented instructions don’t make sense to me and are difficult to remember, as I can’t construct a meaningful picture from them. For instance, assembly diagrams that use images without labels are difficult to follow as I continually have to re-ascertain which part matches that image.
- Activities that depend on recall of visual information are very difficult to complete accurately.
- Drawing and painting was never a strength. I could conceptualize what I wanted to create visually, but could never match the intended result to my haphazard efforts on paper.
In a visually oriented world, the above challenges make some daily tasks slower or more difficult. I think these challenges describe accessibility barriers faced by people with aphantasia. The next question for me becomes, what accommodations can reduce the impact of these barriers?
In spite of the extra difficulty, research so far suggests that people with aphantasia can complete most tasks that involve such imagery. If they are not using imagery, what sort of process might they use? Early research and anecdotal evidence suggests that many people with aphantasia use what I call a “semantic approach” to working with visual information. This involves encoding the visual information into words or concepts that can later be used to reconstruct or manipulate it. I have long considered myself to be a semantic thinker, so this idea resonated with me.
Applying this idea to the examples above, I have identified some approaches that help me:
- While many people like icon-rich user interfaces, having the option to include a text label for the icon vastly increases my ability to find what I want.
- Modern GPS maps with interactive navigation instructions are an excellent accommodation for the map-reading challenge. Instead of synthesizing and remembering from a two-dimensional map, electronic maps provide actionable information at the moment I need it.
- Visually oriented instructions can be supplemented by other types of information, such as labels for each object in a diagram, or distances and road names instead of visual cues for navigation.
- If visual content contains information that I will later need to describe visually, I need to make time to study the image and make a note of features relevant to the task.
- Graphic design and CAD software have opened a new world of visual creation, by allowing me to build visual designs from abstractions that I can see as I go.
These examples suggest that, beyond self-accommodation, the built environment can also meaningfully provide accommodations in the form of more expansive expression. If advancing research continues to support the idea, I think this could be part of expanded accessibility guidance.
Do I think this idea is fully developed? No; rather, I think it is an expansion of the discussion of what it means to have aphantasia, and how from an accessibility perspective we might think about that. There isn’t enough research yet to estimate what proportion of the population has aphantasia, nor what impacts it may have had on those peoples’ lives. But research is progressing, and I think exploration of external accommodation is a complementary exploration to the understanding of self-accommodation.
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