A Deck Translated into Touch

At first glance, these look like ordinary Dutch souvenir cards from the 1960s or 1970s, with postcard views of Amsterdam and The Hague on the aces. But notches cut into the edges allow a blind player to read every suit and rank by touch.

Red Square at the height of tourist season is a Babel of dialects, tour-group flags, and clicking cameras. It was in this noise that I noticed him: a Russian sign-language interpreter working with a group from India. The guide spoke Russian; someone beside him translated into Hindi, and the interpreter, in turn, rendered this double translation once more into sign language for deaf members of the group. Three layers of language, stacked one on top of another, and at the centre of it all, the same St. Basil's Cathedral, equally comprehensible to everyone standing in that motley crowd.

And I found myself wondering: what happens with things far simpler and more ordinary than an architectural tour? With a game, for instance. With a deck of cards, familiar to everyone since childhood, an object so visual by nature that it seems unthinkable without sight: suits distinguished by colour, numbers and figures recognised at a glance. What happens to cards when sight is absent?

The search led me to a deck created specifically for the blind and visually impaired, and it turned out to be a far more elegant solution than I could have imagined. There is no attempt here to compensate for sight with sound, or to replace the cards with something fundamentally different. The solution lies in the same plane as the interpreter's gesture on the Square: not a workaround, but a direct translation into another language of perception. Each card's suit and rank are duplicated in tactile markings, and a hand passing over the card's surface reads it just as confidently and quickly as an eye takes in the familiar "Queen of Spades" at a glance.

For each collector, such a deck is a thing of a special kind. It makes no claim to the artistic extravagance of designer limited editions, nor does it chase historical reconstruction the way many themed decks do. Its value lies elsewhere: it is proof that even the most ordinary object of culture, seen a thousand times over, can be reassembled anew if you look at it through the eyes, literally and figuratively, of someone for whom it was built differently.

It is a standard French-suited deck using Dutch letter indices for the court cards: H (Heer, King), V (Vrouw, Queen) and B (Boer, Jack). It has an intuitively simple system for recognising suits and indexes.