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Visually impaired students from the Miami Lighthouse Project recently took a unique tour of SunLife Stadium. Instead of filing past the Don Shula memorial like other football fans, they 
 stopped to run their hands over the statue’s feet, getting an idea about the height of the bronze players from the size of their shoes. They tried on a Dolphins player’s helmet, learning that the crunching sound they hear during games comes from 7-pound helmets crashing together. On the field, they held handfuls of the cool, cropped grass.

Watching the students through my camera, it wasn’t they used their hands to experience the stadium -- it was how they related to each other and to the people around them. They leaned in to each other to talk, and they verbalized all their actions so that the others could follow. They got close to the objects and talked their way through their experiences so that a friend on the other side of the statue would know to move his hands from the shoe up to the calf muscle to feel how strong the bronze player was. Their relationship to each other was more fascinating than the fact that they had to touch all the objects that people without vision problems take for granted.

I was struck by how extroverted the students were as they passed around the helmet and shared handfuls of grass. One of the students asked what I liked about photography, and I said that I liked expressing my experiences through a different language, a visual language. It occurred to me that I was watching the students speaking in a different language, too, and it made me wonder what vocabulary they use in school, at home or out in the world without their teachers.

JKay