When dealing with blind people, why do a number of people give distances in "steps"?

Do blind people get that answer a lot? Maybe people do it because feet is a visual reference and steps isn’t. Maybe some people actually think in feet and just do a rough “feet to steps conversion” in there heads. I am not one of those people though. As a sighted person, if someone told me that I needed to walk a hundred more feet to get to where I wanted to go I, lol, would probably do a kind of reverse conversion in my head and translate the feet into step because I have no clue how far away 100 feet would be. If a blind person asked me where something was, if it in the city or the suburbs I would use blocks to direct them. Half a block, one block, two blocks, whatever, then turn right and go another two two block and its about whatever distance it might be.

Inside a house I’m not sure. I would look around and try to find some spacial reference. Laundry room: down the hall first door on the right, etc.

Sorry, long winded non-answer but no one else has even tried to answer your question.

And if I was doing my laundry drunk, carrying a load of laundry, I would probably be crawling or stumbling or flat on my ass and that changes the equation entirely; make it difficult to convert into steps. :-)

They do? I did not know that. I couldn’t do it, because I don’t count steps, ever.
I suppose they would do it because they might think it is easier to explain to someone who can’t see.

I would have thought that people would measure distance in time, i.e. “the bathroom is about a minute that-a-way.
When navigating in the dark (I tend to be up well past lights-out) I go by muscle memory, I’ll put a hand to the wall or where furniture ought to be to confirm my location. I know that the stairs are up ahead, and if pressed, I might be able to render the approximate distance in feet (muscle memory is spot-on, but I’m not good at estimating units from there); ultimately, though, it’s just a sort of idea.

I’ve never heard that either. I guess they think only the sighted have an idea of distance.

Imagine you can see, and you are imagining what it is like to be blind.

If I woke up blind one day, I know that by the end of the week I would know how many steps there is to every place in my house. Counting steps is the first thing a person who can see would do, if you challenged them to live blindfold for a month.

For someone who has always been blind, being given directions in steps must be as weird as giving someone who can see some directions in the same way.

If a blind person asked me for directions, I would say ummm… Then I would point, then I would say ummm again, and then I would offer to take them there. I have no idea how I would give a blind person directions. Maybe, I would say how many streets, so they could count how many curbes and roads there are.

I thought blind people are taught to count steps for some things? 10 steps from the bed to the bathroom threshold, 30 steps from the sofa to the fridge. It makes sense. But, I would think the person needs to measure these things out to their own legnth of steps/paces? Maybe if you tell a blind person its thirty paces to the elevator, the don’t need to start feeling for the elevator until around 25+? So they don’t have to touch every door, or worry about every landmark in an unfamiliar setting?

@poisonedantidote: I can’t say this would work for every blind person (N blocks that way, the Xth door on your left), but that would have worked for me… and actually a number of other blind people.
@JLeslie: ... Not in any school I’ve ever attended. If I may ask, where did you get that impression? As I mentioned, I run into this… often enough to notice it as a pattern, and I’m curious where this pattern comes from (I think I’ve even seen it in “how to cope with vision loss” type guides). It always struck me as an impractical way to go about one’s life—my mind’s at least four places at once, and having to keep a tally of steps from my office to the rail station seems like it would be untenable.

Also, in the event someone uses phrases like “that way” or “over there”, I try to estimate the direction based on the way they’re looking (which, incidentally, also tends to be the direction their voice is coming from, since the mouth is usually found on the same side of the face as the eyes). I’ve never quite understood why some blind people get totally offended when someone briefly forgets that they can’t see where you’re pointing—I’d rather it not be a central factor in my interactions with people.

@tallin32 On TV, some show. I can’t remember well which one. It was an episode about someone losing their sight and not wanting to accept it. Finally her family convinces her to get help with being blind, learn some of the helpful tricks. I have no idea if it was a very good depiction of what is really taught or advised.

I’m confused, are you blind?

@tallin32 Dude, now I’ve got this picture in my head of you getting directions from someone who has a deformity that puts their eyes and mouth on different sides of their face, and then getting all confused and lost because of it.

Blind people still can’t drive.

Blind people cannot gauge a distance from looking at it.

When they walk- they measure things in steps – thus – if my 100 meters takes me 74 steps (it does) then tell me something is 100 meters away – or, 74 steps away – then turn right – easy as pie.

Ah yes, what @seazen_ says makes perfect sense of course. I used to use the same method to measure out department space when I worked for Calvin Klein.

@JLeslie: I am, as a matter of fact. Completely blind, since day 1.
@seazen_: ... I have never, ever, to my recollection, measured distances in steps. Approximate feet, perhaps time, number of blocks—certainly (I know it’s, for instance, six blocks from my apartment building to an overpass near the stop where I catch one of several possible buses to get to my office downtown).
Actually, lately, it’s not unusual for blind people to use GPS applications on iPhone or similar, which give directions in feet (in 0.5 miles… in 500 feet… in 200 feet… now). Obviously, these estimations aren’t exact and depend on the amount of satellite coverage you have at any given time, and the way I tend to correct is that “now” == “at the next intersection”. But I’ve absolutely no idea how many steps from my apartment building to the aforementioned overpass, because that varies based on anything from whether I’ve had my requisite three cups of coffee to whether it’s payday to whether I’m carrying my laptop (which adds weight, which slows one down, etc.).

@MacBean: I wonder about that. You sure there wouldn’t be at least two or three people going “OMG THAT GUY’S MOUTH IS ON THE BACK OF HIS HEAD”? :D

@tallin32 I considered that but then figured it would be more likely that people would be averting their eyes and thinking “DON’T DRAW ATTENTION TO IT OR PEOPLE WILL THINK YOU’RE SOME SORT OF -IST.”

@tallin32 Interesting. Are you very young? I wonder if it was an old way of doing things? @seazen_ and I are old. LOL.

Plus, I would guess counting steps only makes sense for rather short distances, if it makes sense at all? I would think I would need a walking stick of some sort, I hate walking when I can’t see. My husband hates that I flip on all the lights when I come into the bedroom late or need to pee in the middle of the night.

I would still put on the lights even if I was blind. Gotta make sure if there is a bug that it runs away before I take a step. Not that I have an insect problem, but it is from the old days of living in the NY apartments. Kind of a habit.

@JLeslie: I’m 34. Of course, I also tended to discard anything in the standard “how to cope with blindness” materials that didn’t seem to pass the common sense test.
I think I know the show you mean, now that I think of it. I wanna say it was an episode of Golden Girls—one of the few episodes that’ll send me diving for the remote, actually, totally based on its inaccuracies. My usual standpoint is that the media portrayal of blindness is the same as the media portrayal of anything else—an attempt to get a point across in as little time as possible, in order to attend to bigger things (like advancing the plot). For instance, not all computers go BEEP BEEP BEEP when there’s an error, and not everyone that uses a wheelchair is completely paralyzed from the waist down. Similarly, not all blind people are completely blind, nor do they all wear dark glasses. But then—if you used me as an example of how blind people do things, you’d probably spend at least an hour of the media explaining the technology I use. Probably not efficient, per “Hollywood Standard Time”.

@tallin32 I would guess blind people have a variety of ways to do the same thing, just like people who see. I would never think every blind person does stuff exactly the same. It might have been Golden Girls, I remember the episode when Rose’s sister is going blind I think? I don’t remember if they specifically mentioned counting steps on the episode? I do realize legally blind does not necessarily mean totally living in the dark. You said you were always blind. Isn’t that rare?

@poisonedantidote I disagree that counting steps would be the first thing a person would do who went blind. If I woke up blind one day I don’t think it would even occur to me to start counting steps in my house particularly because in order to count the number of steps to the bathroom would necessitate me being able to find the bathroom in the first place in order for me to know how many steps it took me to get there. I would feel my way around my house. I know where everything is and as long as no one moved the walls or the doors or the furniture I think I could find my way around without even thinking about counting steps. Plus, like @tallin32, my mind is always on a million things and if something was twenty steps away by the time I counted to 12 my mind would be on something else and I’d have to start over. I’d be hopelessly lost even more often than I am sighted. I would definitely take the tactile route. Blocks can be felt as can doors, banisters, corners, walls, window, stairs, etc. all either with a cane or one’s foot or with one’s hand or with one’s head, in my case. :-)