|
Description
ABSTRACT
The notion of developing countries needs definition, as do the concepts of visual and print impairment. The article looks at the situation of print impaired people in various countries and proposes possible activities to meet their needs based on existing projects and experience.
THE NEED FOR DEFINITIONS
In order to make any sensible comparisons between countries and their libraries serving the print impaired, it is necessary to establish several definitions. It is easy to talk about developing countries and visually impaired readers as though they were all the same. In reality there are radical differences between conditions in different countries, as there are between the different people who, for one reason or another, cannot read a conventionally printed book and need special support.
Any categorizing of countries will be an oversimplification. It will ignore the cultural and political history that makes the country what it is today and may differentiate it from its neighbor, which though similar in geography, climate, and peoples, may yet be different in the services that it provides. For the purposes of this article we have to work with these simplifications.
The differences between countries emerge in the way that each project is set up and carried out. In order to group the descriptions of projects this article will group countries that have sufficient common characteristics. The first group to be considered is those that are poor by any criterion. In many parts of the world there are countries in which there is little social support and in which the average earning power is too low to provide the requisites of education even though there may officially be schools for all. Low wages and a high level of unemployment in a context where the government may not actually know how many citizens it has or where they are is not a recipe for tax-based development. In such countries there is little or no support for the visually impaired, other than that provided by the local organizations of the blind and foreign charities. The chances of a visually impaired child going to school are small, and the chances of the visually impaired having any professional support even smaller.
The second group is those countries that are recognized as being developing countries even though visibly prosperous. There may be banks and all the signs of a high-tech invasion, but next to these there are large parts of the population that live in poverty. There may be schools for the blind but the reality is that only a fraction of visually impaired people receives any help at all. Few get any schooling, and as a result there is rarely any work other than begging.
The third group of countries that will be considered in this article is those that are better developed, or in some cases have been better developed in the past and have lost some of the supporting infrastructure. Such countries will probably have national and local libraries. There will be schools and a reasonable level of social support; however, this support may not extend to all handicapped people. It may mean that visually impaired people have to rely on their own organizations rather than on the state. They may not have the means to develop technical and organizational changes that would enable them to provide effective services to their constituency.
This somewhat arbitrary grouping has emphasized the presence or absence of education, especially for handicapped people. Where there is little education, literacy levels are low and the demand for facilities such as libraries is equally low. In developing countries there is a hard logic. Where there are only a few libraries these are for the educated elite. A broader public library service follows from a policy of universal education. Much of the charitable support, therefore, is connected with books, and reading is focussed on primary and secondary education.
Figures quoted in newspapers at the end of 2005 show that while literacy is slowly increasing in Asia and Latin America, with about a third of the population functionally illiterate, an increasing proportion of its population in Africa has not learned to read or write. When the average across the continent is quoted at nearly 50 percent, and there are countries with successful education programs (think of South Africa, Uganda, and Kenya), then the plight of children in the less-developed countries is serious. If the able children are not being educated, then the disabled have less of a chance. Without education the climb out of poverty will be long and difficult.
WHAT IS PRINT IMPAIRMENT?
People often refer to "the blind" as though they were a lumpen mass rather than a collection of individuals. In order to understand some of the library projects that will be described below, it is worth reminding ourselves what is meant by terms like "blindness," "visual impairment," and "print handicap." The definitions matter since they affect the types of projects and the target groups. Blindness is a scale of measures from seeing absolutely nothing to having partial sight up to the level that the government sets as the limit to be registered as blind.
Research suggests that the percentage of visually impaired people is about the same in all countries (Bruce, Mckennell, & Walker, 1989; Gorter & Melief, 1998). The difference is that the developed countries have an increasingly ageing population who acquire visual impairment, while developing countries have far more young blind and fewer elderly people.
RESOURCES
The resources considered here are those that are provided for visually impaired people, such as Braille, large print, audio, and digital files. These are normally produced in institutions serving the needs of the blind and visually impaired people, rather than in libraries although, as will be seen there are some libraries that incorporate production services. These institutions are necessary to provide an alternative format of the book in question for the simple reason that the client cannot read the book in its original form.
The second, and increasingly important, source of alternative access to literature is public libraries themselves. There are examples of the provision of equipment to enable the print impaired readers to access the materials held by the library. Some of these libraries have also been able to add production facilities, supplying an on-demand service for the production of alternative format materials.
ETHICAL ISSUES
Any consideration of the supply of books to visually impaired people in developing countries has to consider the question of costs against the benefits that can be provided. Access to literature has to be judged alongside other needs. Can we, for example, claim that access to literature is more important than access to clean drinking water? It can be argued that more money should be given to the restoration of sight and preventive medicine than to the provision... |
More articles from Library Trends
The role and activities of the IFLA Libraries for the Blind Section., March 22, 2007
Libraries for the blind as accessible content publishers: copyright an..., March 22, 2007
The DAISY standard: entering the global virtual library., March 22, 2007
Web accessibility., March 22, 2007
The impact of the Integrated Digital Library System on the CNIB Librar..., March 22, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Click here
to search our database of over 3 million articles.
|
