Success Quote by Jim Fiebig

Fiebig’s line works because it flips a quiet assumption: that reading is fundamentally visual, and that Braille is merely a workaround. The phrasing insists on the opposite. Braille isn’t second-best; it’s a different kind of intimacy. “Wonder” signals awe without pity, then the sentence draws emphasis by exclusion: “the sighted will never know.” That’s not a cheap dunk on sighted readers so much as a boundary marker, a reminder that access isn’t just about getting in the door. Some experiences are irreducibly specific, and pretending otherwise can be its own kind of erasure.

The metaphor does the heavy lifting. “To touch words” is literal in Braille, but “have them touch you back” turns reading into a two-way encounter, less like scanning information and more like being met. It suggests feedback, friction, reciprocity: language with texture, meaning that arrives through the skin, not at a distance. In a culture that treats reading as disembodied brainwork, the sentence smuggles the body back into literacy.

Context matters, too. Coming from a businessman rather than a poet or disability scholar, the quote reads like a deliberate reframe aimed at mainstream audiences: stop treating Braille as a charitable accommodation and start recognizing it as a craft and a culture. The subtext nudges sighted people away from sentimental “inspiration” narratives and toward humility: accessibility isn’t only about making the sighted world available to blind readers; it’s also about noticing what the sighted world can’t perceive.