On Fri, Nov 19, 2021 at 12:05 PM, Steve Nutt wrote:

I sometimes wish I could get a handle on the “visual” layout of the screen, so said sighted person could say to me “It’s at top left”, but because we have no concept of where anything is on a web page visually, it does cause a barrier somewhat.

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Steve,

I was going to send this reply as a private message, but reconsidered, since it could be of use to more than yourself.

When I was working at the Virginia School for the Deaf and the Blind, I was fairly "up close and personal" at times with both O&M instruction as well as things like classroom math instruction where tactile diagrams were in use.  In all of those cases, but particularly tactile diagrams, orientation in 2D space was used, and extensively, but access was by touch, of course.

But the basic concepts apply to the computer screen as well, if you think of it as a page, which in reality the screen really is.  Mind you, I doubt it's very useful to you to know that something you cannot access with the senses you possess is at "the upper left" but the concept of "the upper left" as a location is the same for a screen as it is for a physical page.  This allows you to have some rough, and very rough, ability to "pin down" the location that someone has described visually.  If you want to get into playing games with someone where that would not lead to possible disaster, you could use that knowlege to "point out" the rough location on the screen and, on occasion, you may hit the exact target.  But if you have a sighted assistant who wants to work with you with exactitude, it's not difficult for them to describe something as being "near the top left, about one inch down and two inches in," which, again, may be of no help to you directly, but can be of help to you if you need to give that same information to someone who's sighted who is not present at that moment and where you know you'll be making reference to the exact same material at a later point in time.  And you can really weird them out if you just casually toss out, "That {insert specific button, object, etc. here} is the red one thats about an inch down and two inches over from the upper left corner of the screen."  The slack-jawed, "How could you know that reaction," that you might get back, at least the first time you do this to someone sighted, can be quite amusing.  Practical jokes can be most amusing, particularly when they get played from very unexpected angles, and some are way more unexpected than others.
 
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Brian - Windows 10, 64-Bit, Version 21H1, Build 19043  

The ignorance of one voter in a democracy impairs the security of all.

         ~ John F. Kennedy