Can you see what I'm saying?

Regarding teaching aikido to people who are blind, Potatoefist commented:

I can only imagine the difficulty of teaching the moves. Thankfully so much is tactile.

There is a lot going on in trying to teach the blind. One thing that I have become more acutely aware of is the necessity of precision and thoughtfulness in the language I use to convey an idea. The NLP guys have a lot of problems with the (lack of) theory underlying their practice, but there are some real gems scattered throughout their system. Predicate matching is one of them. If you pay attention to people as they talk, you will find that they more often than not favor one type of sensory word (visual, auditory, or kinesthetic). For example, the following sentences mean the same thing to a native speaker but different folks will unconsciously choose to use different ones:

• Do you understand?
• Do you hear what I'm saying?
• Can you see my point?

Now, this is not some type of strict determinism in which a blind person will automatically miss my meaning if I say, "can you see my point?" but deliberately choosing a more appropriate form can establish rapport and make the communication process easier. I started to write "...more straightforward" but that was a subconscious choice related to my preference for kinesthetic predicates. I also tend to say, "do you understand," which is kinesthetic, but nobody is 100% wired for a single representational system, as evidenced by my affinity for the expression "look at this" to get people's attention.
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Anyway, you're right, PF. There is a large tactile component to teaching aikido. Check out this video of Mytchi feeling her way through a wrist release exercise and you will see her get more sure of herself and smoother as the practice progresses.
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Thankfully, we're really trying to teach a set of strategic principles rather than specific techniques. So, Mytchi's aikido can look a lot different from mine and still be "aikido" if it conforms largely to the same principles. The same if true for my one-armed student. The majority of the techniques that 2-handed guys do is directly usable by him, but there are a couple of things that simply do not make sense for his body. It would be ridiculous to try to make him emulate the motion and form of these techniques so that it looks like "2-handed aikido." In these cases he has to come up with some way to demonstrate the underlying principles in the given situation in a way that makes sense for his body. Individualized aiki. When you get right down to it, it's kind of a nutty prospect to try to develop an explicit syllabus of objective skills to apply to everyone for rank tests.
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At the bottom of this is the fact that we are all handicaped in some way or we wouldn't be trying to learn a martial art. Ueshiba, Kano, and Funakoshi all got their starts in martial arts because they were basically frail wimps and were afraid. We are all blind in certain ways ("A man sees what he wants to see and disregards the rest"), so the teaching of aikido has to necessarily be an individualized thing that is specialized for each person's special type of handicap or weakness or blindness or manner of thinking and understanding.