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A user's perspective.

Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT

This article is a personal account of the challenges faced by a library school lecturer who loses sight later in life. It illustrates the difficulties faced by visually impaired people in the United Kingdom in obtaining access to reading materials for work, educational, and leisure purposes. It also considers their future prospects.

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Whenever I think about library services for visually impaired people in the United Kingdom (UK), I am always struck by how confusing they are. As a user I find the variety of sources can be problematic and sometimes frustrating. I am also conscious that despite the number of organizations providing books for visually impaired people, less than 5 percent of UK publications actually appear in Braille, audio, or large print. Of course I am immensely grateful for the material that comes my way even though there is a considerably smaller range of nonfiction than I would like, and I seldom have a recently published book at the time other people are talking about it. I know from talking to other visually impaired people, especially those who have had sight and lost it, that my feelings are not unique and that many of those who can no longer read standard print often feel as I do, angry that unlike sighted people we have to rely to a very great extent on charities to meet our information and recreation reading needs despite our contributions to national and local taxes. Nevertheless, I am optimistic about the future.

Some personal information may help to set my views about library and information services for visually impaired people in context. I have been registered blind since 1987; I am a chartered librarian with an academic background in sociology, and I taught library and information studies for more than two decades. My views about library services for visually impaired people in the UK have clearly been shaped by my experience of sight loss. I am very aware that had I lost my sight only a few years later it would not have been necessary for me to take early retirement from teaching, but at that time synthetic speech and dictation software were yet to be developed. Additionally, while the Polytechnic where I worked had an excellent equal opportunities policy with respect to students, that policy did not at that time extend to meeting the needs of staff with disabilities. The concept of "reasonable adjustments" as elaborated in the Disability Discrimination Act of 1995 (DDA) was in 1989 alien to most employers, and the cost of any adjustments would not then have been deemed affordable. Also, while colleagues were individually sympathetic toward my difficulties, the idea of funds that could be spent on services to students being diverted to one member of staff would not, I am sure, have had much support.

The only help I was offered was someone to read to me for six hours a week....