Monday 23 January 2017

Giles Turnbull's poetry blog

Rogue Strands is always on the look-out for new poetry blogs, so it was a pleasure to discover Giles Turnbull's venture a few weeks ago.

Giles is a blind poet living in Wales. His blog does tackle important issues relating to his blindness, such as the use of awkward terminology, the difficulties involved in reading texts in certain formats and the unique challenge of giving a poetry reading in public. However, it also offers its readers a wide range of interesting articles on poetry in general.. There are posts, for example, on whether men or women make better poetry readers (!), on the relationship between poetry and music, on political poetry, etc, etc. All in all, it's a terrific addition to the U.K. poetry blog scene!

4 comments:

  1. Dear Matthew

    Thanks for drawing my attention to this. At the moment I am reading 'How To Think Like Stephen Hawking' by Daniel Smith which is an inspiring demonstration of how severe disability is not always an insuperable obstacle to serious achievement.

    Best wishes from Simon R Gladdish

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  2. Yes, Giles's blog is great -- and great that someone is doing this. His advice has allowed me to change various aspects of my regular website practice. A seeing person won't see them but hopefully vision loss people will benefit...

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    1. I am always delighted when a website or a publisher takes notice and takes steps to make sure their website content and publications are just as accessible to blind and visually impaired people as they are to sighted people. Often these are easy things to overlook when the website designer or publisher is not visually impaired so would not ordinarily realise what a blind person cannot see. Just half an hour ago I filled in a contact form on a website and hit the send button, only to be greeted by a message that I had not completed the visual CAPTCHA challenge to prove I was in fact human. The irony in this is that the website was one of the American vision training schools for the blind and visually impaired, so have no excuse at all for not spotting this!

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    2. So much is taken for granted by so many of us...

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