"I think what I see is a world without a lot of details," she said. "I see the colors, the shapes, the light."
At 55, she found a way to make this weakness a strength.
In the last couple of years, she'd lost her job, her marriage had come apart, her father had died. What could have been a midlife crisis somehow became her medium for rebirth.
"It's liberating," she said.
She called the newspaper on Monday, the 20th anniversary of the Americans With Disabilities Act, to tell us about her first art exhibit - at her local Starbucks, at Broad and Pine.
Six of her watercolors hang there - dreamy, impressionistic pieces all the more wondrous given the force of concentration that has gone into them.
"I really apologize for having to pull the disabled card," she said on the phone. "When you are born with something that makes your life different from other people's, you tend to cling to that identity of not being able to do this or that. I think ultimately we're not all that different. And I think that realization's hard for many people to come to."
I met her the next day at the Starbucks. Look for a woman with a mop of curly hair, she said. I spotted her in a near corner, a stack of watercolors by her side. When I approached she stood, and explained that what a perfectly sighted person can see from 100 feet away, she must be 20 feet away to see. She's practiced at approximating what is barely visible.
Ylanah Sloane spent a career working for nonprofits, putting to use a Bryn Mawr degree in social work and a feel for people who are struggling.
But she always felt like the square peg, as far back as elementary school in Wynnefield, where she was mainstreamed instead of being sent to Overbrook School for the Blind. That proved good and bad.
