Lipstick as synaesthesia accessibility hack.

03 October 2016

This afternoon at a gather I had chance to speak with Tarah Wheeler at some length, and she noticed that I spent most of the discussion reading her lips. As part of the discussion it came out that I'm a synaesthete and was having great difficulty understanding her because I was unable to pick her voice out of all of the distracting visual phenomena due to all of the other discussions happening around me, but I was able to focus on her lipstick and pick her voice out of all of the static. The discussion turned to synaesthesia as I experience it and she asked if she could interview me briefly on the topic as an issue of accessibility (note: I do not consider myself disabled because I experience synaesthesia, I thought everybody saw and felt sounds until I was 28). Here's the interview: