Stephen Downes

I don't know whether I have aphantasia or not. "Aphantasia is an inability to voluntarily call up mental images," writes Hollis Robbins. "I've written about my own aphantasia and differences in mental modeling." It seems to me that I don't have mental imagery - I can hear voices clearly in my mind, but for me 'visualization' is nothing like that. I am terrible at remembering faces (if I've ever offended you by just walking by as though you're a stranger, this is why). This article is interesting to me because it describes how website design interacts with aphantasia. "Many of us with aphantasia cannot build mental maps. The locations do not attach to an internal picture, so the user is repeatedly reading labels and scanning the page." That is definitely my experience. Despite 45 years experience using keyboards, when my the lable on my keys wore out I had to find keys by counting ('q', 'w', 'e', 'r', 't'...). "Every instruction that says 'click the megaphone' or 'open the three-dot menu next to the assignment' leads to more scanning and uncertainty." Yes, exactly.