My Vision

I got into tarot in October of 2024, during a really horrible year. Four days in, I tore my cornea. That led to a fungal infection in my one working eye, and it was caused by my eyelids not meeting properly, which required surgery to fix. I wasn’t able to wear any kind of corrective lens for a year, and my glasses only correct me to 20/100. To make matters worse, one of the only lasting effects from the scar in my cornea is that I have to struggle to read text on paper. Even now, with a scleral lens that makes my distance vision the best it’s been in years—20/50—that’s a problem. I can read on my devices, set to white-on-black. And I can see tarot cards.

I actually tried to learn tarot in 2023, after reading Caroline O’Donaghue’s books, but the deck I had was pippish. I’d kickstarted the Raven’s Prophecy because I loved those books, but they don’t overlap like I’d hoped. Some time that year, I pre-ordered the Buffy deck, because obsessed, but I hadn’t opened it. I did so on a whim, and fell down a rabbit hole.

Without my glasses, my nearsightedness made it possible to read the Little Purple Book, and eventually I used the phone camera to OCR it. That’s what I do, now, because I can’t take my lens out while I’m doing readings. Once it became clear that my scleral wasn’t a panacea, even with glasses, I spent a week OCRing all the guidebooks I’d set aside for “once I can see.” They’re not pretty, but if you see a deck in my collection that you physically have and you want the most basic version of the text, I can share. The Every Day Enchantments book was a supreme pain in the ass. I’m incredibly grateful that the Wild Archetypes Oracle book is  online, because there’s no way ABBYY would be able to handle the font, much less the text along the edges of each page. at finding a PDF of a guidebook online likely means it’s because the deck is available as a counterfeit, but I cannot tell you how much time having my newest deck pop up on Scrib’d saves me.

Tarot is not a visually-impaired person’s game. If your first thought before reading this might’ve been well, yeah, you have to see the cards, now you can think of me, legally-blind, but perfectly able to see an illustrated card. Where other people line their decks with markers, I’ve had to go through and Sharpie in numbers and suits on decks where the titles don’t stand out well enough—it’s not just a matter of size, because the issue has to do with the way light hits my cornea. What, exactly, I’d love for someone to explain to me. None of my doctors have been able to do so.—Otherwise, I have to examine each card through my phone camera before putting it down. Not great, when I already use my phone to type up readings. I’ll have to do that regardless with the Witch’s Garden Tarot. The linen finish that folks love so much doesn’t hold Sharpie, not even the gold that is going to be there to remind me where I screwed up numbering the Hush Tarot for the rest of my life (alcohol didn’t work. Gonna try acetone.)

I’ve taken in most of my literature via audiobook over the past year. Occasionally, I can stand to use a virtual voice on something non-fiction that isn’t available, but it’s tedious. Not infrequently, tarot books are only available in hardcopy, and the backlog of those I’ve got to squint my way through puts anything that came into my life as late as last October low on the list. I received my annotated copy of Six of Crows the week after the tear happened, and it was only the first of my LitJoy annotated editions that came in over the past year. The Literary Tarot book gets to skip ahead, because it’s not black-on-white. I wanted to use Our Tarot for Women’s History Month, but the book is an actual book, and while I was able to accidentally purchase it independent of the cards, it’s not available as an ebook. “Scanning” something of that length with my phone is too tedious even for me. (I do plan to get a hand-held scanner at some point, for use with more than just tarot, once I’ve paid off two pairs of glasses and the surgeries.)

I’m not complaining, here. (Well, I am complaining about the stupid scar.) Not really. I’m just describing my situation. And maybe hoping that if you create a deck, you’ll think to ensure your titles are legible at a decent contrast. I love, love, love the Unfolding Path Tarot, but even though the letters on the court cards are large, they blend into the background. I hate to encourage scanning LWBs, because it benefits counterfeiters, but again, if you create a deck, having a PDF option is a life-saver. Some creators have been great about sending one to me, but I’ve yet to hear back from even an indie publisher. Especially disappointing when one well-known deck creator advertises that they’ll respond within a day.

A year ago, I couldn’t have imagined I’d be putting this much effort into reading tarot, I wouldn’t have believed you. For obvious reasons, I’m not a hugely visual person. But here we are. And now that I know it’s necessary, scanning in the LWB is a good way to get to know a deck—as long as you’re not doing seven over the course of a weekend. Apple’s text recognition is superior, if you can take the time to copy-and-paste from the photo, and in the case of books with columns, or other structures, it took less time than correcting what the OCR app put out.

There are tarot books that go on about handwriting journals, and readings. I’m so grateful that I discovered it at a time where I can carry all of that in my phone. I love the physicality of the cards, but the physical part of my disability, which we haven’t even gone into, makes me glad I can also have some of my decks on it, too. Tech isn’t everything. As an example, for apps without dark mode I have to invert colors on, and they often invert images, making browsing tarot cards difficult. But it’s bridged a lot of gaps for me, and that’s something I love about tarot. it lets you do things differently. The cards don’t care how you get to the message, as long as you listen to what it says.